Not a fan of ansible's yaml, but when I setup my personal sever (1 websever) with ansible I though it was pretty cool I could duplicate my entire setup in a VM

Not a fan of ansible's yaml, but when I setup my personal sever (1 websever) with ansible I though it was pretty cool I could duplicate my entire setup in a VM for testing with one command. Then it saved my butt when I got locked out of my VPS instance cause I lost the key. Just spin up a new one and run ansible. I was back online in less than 5 minutes. Not saying you couldn't do that with custom scripts, but I found that when I tried writing my own admin scripts I was solving problems that the ansible team has already solved. It's a matter of what you want to spend time on IMO.