I Replaced My Manual 15-Step Linux Hardening Runbook with Ansible

Whenever I used to spin up a new Linux server, my manual setup routine was always the same: SSH in, update system packages, configure UFW firewall rules, set up Fail2ban jails, write Nginx proxy configurations with security headers, and verify that services were enabled at boot. Manually running through that checklist took roughly 25 minutes per machine. On a single test box it wasn't a blocker, but repeating those steps across multiple environments quickly became repetitive, tedious, and prone