This could have been written by me. And for who ever doesn't have time to maintain roles, there is Ansible Galaxy or tons of roles in GitHub, including mine: https://github.com/liv-io

I've looked an Ansible a couple of times, but I always think it looks too verbose, but more than that the way files for the same thing are spread out across multiple folders just makes it seem like there is a steep learning curve. Something like Ansible sounds great, but it feels like learning it would be a chore.

It doesn't matter if you use Ansible, something else, or something you made yourself to your own taste.

The tool doesn't matter, it's the practice that matters ;)

If you want more fun stand up your own k8s cluster.

Actually I have and I love it, when I need more than 99.9% uptime and/or clustering.