[jhundal]

I'd like to add that a first cut as infrastructure-as-code could be as simple as putting your manual setup tasks (including SSHing into a host) into a shell script and committing it to your repo.

But it takes a only trivial amount of additional time to set up an Ansible playbook (which abstracts away SSHing to a host) and then runs a shell script that's only concerned with actual setup tasks. Enough for shipping code and a good starting point for using the declarative aspects of Ansible to make your setup/deploy processes more automated and less error-prone.

It is possible to cargo-cult infrastructure best practices and make the mistake of investing too much engineering resources in making your deployment practices perfect (for some definition of perfect). Infrastructure-as-code should be understood as a continual process, not something to get completely right on day one, but that applies to any part of your code/product/infrastructure.

Edited: typos