Initial thoughts of 20 year veteran: - Create a single-source-of-truth you can automate against. Do that now. Use ansible to fetch and create an overview of wh

Initial thoughts of 20 year veteran: - Create a single-source-of-truth you can automate against. Do that now. Use ansible to fetch and create an overview of what your landscape actually is running: which software, which versions. Find out what is going EOL, as this will bite you soon enough. - don't automate anything else until you understand the full context of what you are automating. Automation is abstraction, and you don't know yet what to abstract. - When you do automate, start with writing tests. https://testinfra.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://testinfra.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ is quick win to ensure all your systems have certain configuration, can reach certain ports, have closed other ports. - Once you have tests in place you can start creating ansible playbooks for changes, as changes _will_ happen.