What I like about Ansible:

  - It provides a standard procedural format for my shell scripts
  - It comes with some level of type-checking when I play a script
  - It makes me actually test that my procedures can bootstrap
  - The playbook style helps me keep scripts organized
  - It lets me start from "You have a server." without questioning where it came from.
  - Ansible, while "bottom-up", lets me bootstrap "top-down" systems like Kubernetes, container registries, etc.