Automating infrastructure and treating it like code is a similar shift in mindset to embracing test driven development for the first time. It appears daunting,

Automating infrastructure and treating it like code is a similar shift in mindset to embracing test driven development for the first time. It appears daunting, but once you get over the hump you can't imagine how you ever survived without it. If you have a mythical quiet Friday afternoon install Vagrant and try and replicate your manual setup steps for a new server and share it with your development team. Even just having the steps required to set up a development environment represented in re-usable versioned code is worthwhile. Next time a new hire starts that afternoon repays itself when they have a fully working dev environment ready in less then an hour. Going from that, to doing this stuff in production is a lot of work, but you get similar pay offs at every step as long as you're willing to invest a little time.