[etaioinshrdlu]

I have so far found Hetzner Dedicated servers to resist most forms of "infrastructure as code".

I can't seem to even be able to restore one from an image...

This applies only to dedicated ... but to me that's the interesting part of Hetzner.

I might just use Ansible to provision Hetzner servers that I set up manually initially. The cost savings are there to make it worth the hassle.

Wish there was a cleaner approach.

[danmaz74]

I wouldn't suggest to use that for the main DB, but for almost everything else docker works perfectly fine on Hetzner.

[etaioinshrdlu]

Right, but I'm concerned with the initial provisioning of the OS on which docker runs. It's not nothing even if the apps run in docker.

[danmaz74]

In most cases, you can just provision the OS from a web interface. If you get a bigger machine where you need to configure the disks yourself, there is a pretty easy to use command line tool they built which does most of the work.

The only part which I had to learn the hard way is configuring iptables to secure my servers against external attacks. Luckily, recent versions of docker make it easy to keep iptables configured - at the beginning, that was almost a nightmare...

[etaioinshrdlu]

Is there a command line tool to automate installing the OS?

Well what I would really like is to be able to deploy something like an "AMI" on these dedicated servers. Any ideas for how to get something close?

[danmaz74]

Yes, there is one: https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Installimage/en