Yeah that's what I was doing for almost 5 years before I found Ansible. Now I even don't bother to put a CD. I go to my VPS provider and add a VPS then add my key and run an ansible playbook, which installs whatever I want, the way I wanted it.

The thing with package managers is that it get's boring to do everything all over again for a large amount of servers. Also your brain memory does not have a reliable version control. You need to keep why and how you do certain stuff on your server somewhere else. First thing that comes to your mind is a shell script and people are already using something better ( ansible, puppet, etc. ). Now, with this article, I see that there is something even better than this.