Wow, I didn't know that AWS had a managed redis service! I thought Elasticache was only for Elasticsearch. Thank you for pointing this out.

In my experience, setting up redis is very easy and not time-consuming; what is not trivial is to store large amounts of data in it, which requires either getting more RAM or considering a clustering option.

I'll very much have this option in mind for upcoming projects where I'm not the sole owner.

Regarding Ansible vs bash/ssh, I'll probably (hopefully!) come to the point where I'll need something more sophisticated. Ansible is definitely my benchmark for an elegant solution to idempotent provisioning and infrastructure as code. I might not help writing something custom in js, but I definitely will have to go beyond bash and purely imperative approaches. I'll be sure to share what I learn along the way.