[okeuro49]

> IME using Ansible for small-scale automation is no faster than just running the tasks manually, once development time is taken into account - you need tens of servers to make it worthwhile, by which point containers start to look more appealing.

Ansible has a very low learning curve. I cringe with the thought of the time it would take documenting then typing in all the commands to setup my servers manually. That's just not feasible. Ansible provides a sweet spot between traditional "pet" servers and containerisation.

It's not only the number of servers that matters. It's also about being able to create ephemeral staging/developer environments, and easily being able to easily migrate to different VM providers.