A cattle server needs no special maintenance. Yes, if you only have one server then by definition it'll require special maintenance, but that maintenance should

A cattle server needs no special maintenance. Yes, if you only have one server then by definition it'll require special maintenance, but that maintenance should be as generic as practicable so that if you ever need to set up a second one then you don't need to do anything special. That's the distinction between pets and cattle, not the tooling: you can configure cattle by hand if you have a repeatable and non-special cased setup script to follow, and you can use Ansible or Puppet or whatever to set up the unique environment your pet server needs. The important thing is that the setup process, maintenance, etc is standardized and documented. Automated is a bonus that should be relatively easy if you're doing it right