[LinuxBender]

This is probably not the answer you are looking for but I don't have a blog on this. For what it's worth there are existing blogs that talk about managing instances on multiple VPS providers with Ansible. I would actually defer to the proper devops people here that probably have their favorite write-ups on this topic since I basically fumbled my way through it. Some VPS providers have written Ansible plugins that integrate with their API's and some do not which just means spinning up nodes has to be done in their web interface ahead of time and setting up the SSH key trusts. For the ones that do that just means setting shell environment variables that contain the API token and calling their plugin. Linode has an Ansible plugin.

[cfiggers]

Your non-expert/non-specialist perspective is precisely what would be most valuable to me, a fellow non-expert/non-specialist. Your use case is similar to mine. You sound like you have a low threshold for extraneous BS that might nerdsnipe a prosumer, just like me. And when you say "fumbled my way through it" I hear "I dunno man, I just want it to work," which is exactly my viewpoint. All that means that whatever you might write would come at a subject I find intriguing from a perspective very similar to my own, and would therefore be more readily applicable to my interests, and probably require less flailing to make useful, than something written by or for "proper DevOps people".

No pressure intended, though, blog writing is work (unpaid work no less, for the overwhelming majority of people who aren't trying to make it their whole deal).