Had something along these lines - a mail server that ended up used almost exclusively for sending automated internal emails. We’d migrated to a third party for email sending because managing DNS etc for clients got pretty painful. Mail server got removed by the tech lead and repointed to our third party mail provider without telling anyone, and 3 days into the months we’d hit our billing limit, on the lead’s day off. Turns out that one service had been sending an order of magnitude more email than all of our other services put together, as someone had been using email as a logging method.

That was a… fun day.

I really want the Vim/VS Code one - as someone who professionally devs in an MS stack, but would choose Vim as a primary text editor otherwise… it speaks to me deeply.

Up until now I’ve been using docker and mostly manually configuring by dumping docker compose files in /opt/whatever and calling it a day. Portainer is running, but I mainly use it for monitoring and occasionally admin tasks. Yesterday though, I spun up machine number 3 and I’m strongly considering setting up something better for provisioning/config. After it’s all set up right, it’s never been a big problem, but there are a couple of bits of initial with that are a bit of a pain (mostly hooking up wireguard, which I use as a tunnel for remote admin and off-site reverse proxying.

Salt is probably the strongest contender for me, though that’s just because I’ve got a bit of experience with it.

I’ll get QA to update the test plan