I cannot upvote this enough. One of the experiences I had was applying it to provisioning with idempotent shell scripts, combined with a trivial tool like http

I cannot upvote this enough. One of the experiences I had was applying it to provisioning with idempotent shell scripts, combined with a trivial tool like https://github.com/lloeki/apply https://github.com/lloeki/apply Creating a VM in DO would add the basic SSH keys, then just run the thing against the new IP. Boom, VM ready. Want to make existing VMs config up to date? Apply. Boom. The whole thing ridiculously scaled up in a totally unexpected way, saving hundreds of hours of headaches and mistakes. Why not ansible/puppet? Check out the rationale in the readme.