Someone told me that our public facing dns server running bind has 3800+ days of uptime and despite bind is up to date, the Linux version is really old... it's running on a dl360 g4 server. Since they also proposed to have a different master/slave configuration my idea was to use ansible to have all the stuff reproducible. Then packer seemed to be necessary, then started to look at some more complex configurations and found that in many cases you just create gigantic bash script that apply the configurations. So I should go to my wiki page with all the commands to create my server and transform them into a script that I should test several times. Ok if you have 100s of identical servers, but when you have just 4?

I used to use this automation pattern when I only had 2-3 of each type of server, and it paid off massively. Regular tasks that previously took a long time like OS upgrades, audit data collections and temporary dev access only took seconds or minutes, and ticket turnaround times dropped massively.