Ask HN: Please recommend how to manage personal serverss

I'm not an infrastructure engineer nor do I work in web, but I'm pretty comfortable with Linux. I realised I need to spin up a couple of home servers and VPSs to simplify and localise my digital life, and I have an RPi and an x86 NAS in my home network, and a VPS in the cloud. They run different hardware and distros, so I have to set them up a bit differently, which is a pain of itself, but what makes matters worse is a situation when I mess something up real bad or when there's another reason that essentially forces me to reinstall.

I tried Ansible and find it hard to use. E.g. at some point I decided to redeploy my server to a different VPS type in the same cloud, but I had to patch my Ansible scripts to do so, even though it was the same Rocky Linux distro (and it failed at some random docker compose networking config IIRC). I guess, Ansible scripts aren't reproducible and require constant work to keep them working. But I very much like them vs just SSH-ing into servers.

That leads to my question. Is there anything I can do to write config once and just deploy it more or less reliably? NixOS looks interesting, but learning another programming language just for this feels a bit too much for me. Or maybe there's another way to do stuff like this which I overlook as I'm in a different industry?

I just use NixOS flakes with a syncthing'ed flake repo across 5 hosts (desktop, laptop, a media device (NUC7), a home server and a VPS). It has its problems, but I'll iron them out eventually.

As always start small...

Might I suggest a different route that I took - use the base image from whatever vps and modify as little as possible of it. Then run everything else in docker.

That's how I migrated my placeholder website and my gogs install across to a new provider: I copied my data across and ran the original commands to launch docker containers that I used on the first server. These are now happily running on the new server.

If you're running a server in the cloud it's already available.

It takes no effort to set up yourself .. and it's just a basic script that is run that sets up a server exactly how you want it.

It's an orchestration tool that's common in the real world, and also notoriously hard to learn and "get right". Downtime due to obvious, important mistakes is common, and it leaves both engineers and lower management wondering if it was a good idea to adopt.

The thing is, in your home environment, you have no (or hopefully significantly lower) uptime requirements. If you break the entire cluster for a few days, because you ran into a network problem or upgraded it wrong, who cares? That's a potentially hundred-thousand-dollar learning opportunity at a large organization, for just the cost of electricity in your home.

For what it's worth, I run Kubernetes both in my day job and in my home lab. I've learned more about networking from running my own cluster on bare metal (HP DL360 boxes) than I have from ten years of managing infrastructure for bigcorp's, and it also gives me a safe place to play with functionality that I might want to adopt at work.