I mostly use cloud-init these days, to the point where I just went and built a shim (https://github.com/rcarmo/ground-init https://github.com/rcarmo/ground-init

I mostly use cloud-init these days, to the point where I just went and built a shim (https://github.com/rcarmo/ground-init https://github.com/rcarmo/ground-init) for desktop setups. But if you don’t nuke & pave your infrastructure, Ansible is much better than other desired state configuration tools (Puppet was infamous for locking us out of machines, Salt was full of quirks, PowerShell DSC is… well… just not something I’ve ever liked to use in any way, etc.)