I completely agree. But I’m working from the assumption that if OP actually needs the ability to automatically provisions platforms, they’re probably working at a larger scale than the typical small self-hosted home server. And I like to give options.

IMO, the only tools here that most self hosters need are Docker, and maybe Ansible, though even that is a stretch because in most cases you’re just going to have one server running all your containers and that’s it.

It’s the whole “Cattle vs Pets” question. When you’re a typical self hoster, you’re probably better off just treating every server as a pet. But if you’re using self hosting as a way of building job skills (which is exactly how I broke into IT) then you absolutely want to start learning how to wrangle cattle.