[sshine]

Ansible is not a waste of time. It's a tool for a certain set of tasks.

I learned Ansible in 2021 after mainly having used Kubernetes, Helm and Terraform at work.

I did that because I needed to deploy self-hosted Kubernetes nodes, virtual machines and VPNs; while there are Terraform providers (drivers) for open-source hypervisors, you still need to get your OS from vanilla to installed-and-configured. Ansible does that.

And yes, you could build install images and deploy them directly on your hardware. But with certain non-cloud datacenters, the pick-your-image option is sometimes limited. Being able to pick some preferred vanilla image and run the same commands to get the same node up and running is just so easy to experiment with, and it works even before your image registry server is up and running.