Take the time to learn a tool like Ansible. It is not about replaying a simple sequence of commands (imperative). It is more about declaring what you want your system to look like, and letting the tool decide which pieces need to run based on the current state of the system.<p>It&#x27;s like make vs a shell script. If you use scripts to build your programs, you either have to write your own checks to test whether every step is necessary or not (cumbersome, error prone, and quite complex) or you just script it to build from scratch every time (inefficient).<p>But for systems management, rebuilding from scratch can be worse than just inefficient. Imagine if your script reinstalled MySQL from scratch every time you ran it...