| There's no such thing as an oneshot if you're creating a system that someone will actually use and depend on. All systems have a lifecycle, and even on a "trivial" system you have backups, access, monitoring, logging and security maintenance to worry about even before you consider how installing any useful software affects those things. There are exceptions to any rule, of course, and I did in fact create a system where the configuration management is a snapshot backup just two weeks ago; but that system has no data on it, its lifecycle is expected to last for less than a year, and if/when it breaks, a backup restore can be performed without any additional considerations. It was also an emergency installation into a network that's not easily accessible with SSH, which is why I did not just use Ansible from the start. I thought it would be a oneshot, but I did end up having to create a second instance of the system a few days later, fortunately with less emergency :P Still even ignoring that, I fail to see what could possibly be overkill about literally 3 small files in a git repository. You call "overengineering" what is to me "5 minutes of effort with extremely relevant upsides". That's literally how much time it would take me to create a playbook for unbound if I already know what the configuration needs to look like; probably less, but most of the time will be lost to context-switching overhead. My point being, most of the time will be spent actually configuring the software and the automation overhead is nothing in comparison compared to the value you get from it, and that's why I generally automate things by default: It provides more value than I put in effort. When you start of learning configuration management and infra automation tools, there's a learning curve; in the beginning, you will be "wasting" time learning (what a silly statement) how to use your tools effectively, but with practice, you will learn how to effectively use the tools and where to apply them and how to approach managing specific kinds of systems such that over time, using the automation tools is simply easier and faster than doing it manually. That's what I meant when I mentioned "higher quality" earlier; you get it for free, with no effort, once you've put in a bit of practice first. It just sounds to me like you're arguing against doing things well in favour of doing things with strictly inferior tools. |