Provisioning Machines

Not written yet. Questions to answer here: what infrastructure as code means concretely, what Terraform’s state file is and why it is the thing that goes wrong, where Packer sits (baking an image ahead of time) against Cloud-Init and Kickstart (configuring at first boot), what Ansible does that the others do not, the difference between declarative and imperative provisioning and when each is correct, and what changes when the machine is physical hardware on a manufacturing line rather than a cloud instance.