If the concern is initial provisioning I handle that by using Ubuntu server for my RPi cluster. Ubuntu server for the RPi supports using cloud-init for initial

If the concern is initial provisioning I handle that by using Ubuntu server for my RPi cluster. Ubuntu server for the RPi supports using cloud-init for initial configuration of the server. In my case I only have 2 different configurations, controller node and worker node. When deploying a new worker node I use a single digit line count shell script to produce the cloud-init files for that node from my template. Basically the only changes between worker nodes are the host name and static IP assigned. I then copy the resulting files to the FAT partition of the boot sdcard. Someday I might replace this with network booting and something like ansible but for now this is an easy solution and handles 99% of my particular needs.