Lessons on provisioning

• One golden image, cloned many times. Consistency first; it kills "works on that box" bugs.
• Bake the common, inject the unique. Shared tooling in the template; hostname/IP/credentials via cloud-init.
• Have an address convention. "IP = VM-ID minus 100" removes a whole class of lookups and mistakes.
• Let disks grow themselves on first boot rather than resizing by hand.
• Clean up the throwaway pieces (snippets, temp secrets) as part of the flow, not as an afterthought.
• The payoff: a brand-new, fully-configured, log-shipping VM in well under a minute — repeatable, identical, and disposable.