I didn't care about the AWS and zsh aspects of the article, but what vendor lock-in are you talking about and how exactly would an ansible playbook sort it?

All you need is any ubuntu vps - in fact any systemd distro if you ignore the "ufw" commands - and the 50 or so lines following "Wireguard Setup".

It doesn't get more simple than this.

Well using the aws cli is locking you in to AWS, isn't it? And at least from my experience those "just 50 lines of shell" can get very messy overtime. Eventually, if you add more features (pretty much every project gets more features over time), you will refactor once or twice and end up rewriting it in Python, make it more declarative because it's easier to test and tada, you just reinvented Ansible yourself. I think this question is legit.

Question is not legit. Refactor what? Did you guys actually read the article?

Just copy/paste them commands in any linux vps. You don't need aws, at least lightsail is cheap. Ionos (1&1) is cheaper.

Might be the only tooling they have experience using. “When the only thing you have is a hammer everything is a nail” sort of thing.

First off...wow. Never expected this to hit front page. Just started writing and trying to get the juices flowing.

You could totally use an Ansible playbook. I've used a lot of them over the years. Ansible, Terraform, Salt, Chef, Puppet, etc... As I said at the end of the article I glossed over a lot of things and the beauty of tech is there are lots of ways to do things. Do what works for you. Tradeoffs all over the place.

I do think that shell scripts provide lower level insight to people that may be trying to understand what is going on rather than the magic of something like Ansible that abstracts things away. Or maybe I'm just old school :D

Ansible, etc, are great.

But also one more dependancy.

More and more I'm finding having a bash script that can work on most debian/ubuntu systems is pretty handy to be able to run remotely whether it's a VPS or more.