You want "provisioning scripts" no matter what. That's what ensures your systems are uniform and that you can easily and semi-sanely maintain them. Deploying a

You want "provisioning scripts" no matter what. That's what ensures your systems are uniform and that you can easily and semi-sanely maintain them. Deploying a server without some type of scripted process is like deploying a codebase without version control. You're just crossing your fingers and jumping off the bridge with a hope and prayer that something that happened in the background sometime in the past makes it all work, and no way to track what's really happening. This is even more precarious with servers than with code because servers have tons of little highly-specific config changes that are much more difficult to transfer than copying and pasting `BOBS_PROGRAM_v2017-08-04.EXE`. ----- A small shop should be able to manage their own servers as long as they remain reasonable with it (i.e., don't "scale out" to an infrastructure with 40 microservices running 8 instances each). You don't need to pay a guy $10k/mo to admin the 4-6 boxes that may actually be needed. If people are the key to a good startup, why forward the equivalent of 2 coders' pay to Amazon? The frequently-unacknowledged reality behind AWS et al is that many devs aren't what they're cracked up to be.