How I keep my sysadmin overhead to a minimum

• Pets, not cattle.
• VMs, not containers. (except for apps that I can treat like ‘appliances’, like mailcow:dockerized, or TrueNAS apps.)
• Backups, not cold-standbys.
• Documentation, not playbooks.
  (OK some playbooks of course, but I keep it as close to vanilla Ubuntu as possible).
• Auto-updates everywhere.

If things are that simple and if I have notes about deployment and config steps, then if something breaks, I just re-deploy and restore from backups.