Submitter here. I stumbled upon cloud-init while reading this HN discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43302495

It would be interesting to discuss the pros and cons of this sort of technology vs containerization.

I use cloud init in proxmox at home and basic containertization for vps (for example, one of my apps is hosted on a $5 hetzner, has a full install script that also handles docker installation)