Ask HN: How do you automate your server provisioning?

You already mention several https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open-source_conf...

Have a look at ansible, it works agentless (no daemon on target machine).

I've used ansible for bootstrapping new nodes and Chef recipes to converge the node to desired state. This pattern worked well enough for both bare metal and EC2 instances. We just ran separate Chef servers in each.

I use a Node.JS script. JavaScrip/Node is really good at dealing with text IO, and async operations. I for example use the SSH module to SSH into a server to run apt and edit configuration files.

I started writing some scripts that will execute scp to copy over some shell scripts and then a script to ssh into it and execute one command. These commands run apt

RDS + Elastic Beanstalk, because I am extremely lazy and like GUIs