I tried to learn Puppet in combination with Vagrant for provision rather simple severs, and that was too hard (I had things to do). I then tried to learn Ansible, but didn't get very far. I ended up giving up and writing a shell script that has some simple reusable functions ("is this package installed, if not install it", "does this exact file exist, if not copy it over", etc)

I would rather use Ansible. It seemed like it would fit what I'm trying to do, but everything I can find seems geared towards multiple servers, rather than provisioning a VM and/or an AWS instance identically.

Anyone got some good resources for it?