All the deployment things are just wrappers to shell commands so if you want to help people debug user-data.sh, cron, ansible, docker files, or puppet, you need

All the deployment things are just wrappers to shell commands so if you want to help people debug user-data.sh, cron, ansible, docker files, or puppet, you need to understand shell. Also, it is better to have something in bash as code than not have it be fully automated. I draw the line at arrays tho. If you want arrays don’t do bash. But if you want to just run a bunch of commands on your compute, bash is there. One thing I have started doing for stuff that need to go via ssh is I just do a here doc for an embedded shell script that I scp to the remote and then just use ssh to invoke it. The quoting and pseudotty stuff just got to be too dumb to understand. Also, and maybe this is just for non-interactive scripts, I find everything from writing them to using them is a lot easier if you take pains to make them idempotent, so you can run them one or 100 times with the same effect.