> I do some basic stuff in cloud-init (which is already frustrating enough)

What do you find frustrating about cloud-init? I'm relatively new to it.

The YAML structure seems poorly thought out, the documentation is low quality, the iteration loop is tedious, etc.

> the iteration loop is tedious

I feel that about the cloud as a whole, tbf. It's incredibly painful to me.

Yeah, I mean you're kind of eating shit either way. You either have to deal with cloud friction or Linux friction, and at least cloud friction is mostly stuff like IAM where the friction is mostly about nudging you toward a better security posture. In Linux the friction is boring stuff like "every component has a different configuration file format and different expectations about where those configuration files are on disk and where it keeps its application data and how it names its command line arguments" and so on.

This isn't bad for a small team, but it becomes increasingly painful as you scale, but it's really hard to make it work smoothly for bigger teams (the sysadmin team becomes a bottleneck for everyone's deployment, deployments slow to a crawl so everyone builds these enormous, buggy releases, testing becomes a once-a-month thing instead of a continuous thing, etc). And the teams that do it well basically end up reinventing a big chunk of the cloud without any of the benefits of a standard, well-documented, widely-understood cloud platform anyway.