For me, a lot of this is driven by wanting to know how things work. For example, I can go to Digital Ocean or Oracle Cloud or Azure or AWS and get a VM provisi

For me, a lot of this is driven by wanting to know how things work. For example, I can go to Digital Ocean or Oracle Cloud or Azure or AWS and get a VM provisioned in a minute or so. I know some of the tools involved, like cloud-init, but I'd really like to know how the rest of it works and to see it in action. Honestly though, the number of times I need to build a new VM is very small. The time savings that come with each individual VM build will never recoup the time spent building out the pieces required to make it happen. But knowing how that all works will be worth it.