If manual Linux server maintenance is like working with clay, Ansible is like a clay gun. It works great when you have to initiate work on a server you have lim

If manual Linux server maintenance is like working with clay, Ansible is like a clay gun. It works great when you have to initiate work on a server you have limited control over; e.g. one that is provisioned from a cloud provider. And where I don’t need more than a few commands, and never need to replay them. Ansible is “bottom-up” (you start in the middle of a server’s lifetime without knowing everything); many more cloudy solutions like Kubernetes assume that a bunch of infrastructure is already set up; container registries, build servers, and the control plane. My first Ansible use-case was to install K3s on a dedicated machine where I could only choose the OS image from a few options like Debian and CentOS.