Nah. Other people need to use them too. You just don't do that kind of stuff managing a fleet of servers. Keep it standard. Automation is yet another thing to manage and maintain. I keep all of my servers completely standard.

Surely you can put your own dotfiles into your own account on that machine, though, without impacting other people?

Not when everyone logs in as ec2-user.

That's horrific!

> Automation is yet another thing to manage and maintain

But supposedly you already have an automation that you maintain your standard servers with. Adding an Ansible role that puts .vimrc into $HOME surely isn't that much of a maintenance burden?

The better place to spend time might be the automation of operational tasks on those servers so that logging in isn’t necessary in the first place. Then you don’t have to leave your home environment and you can run whatever custom editing configuration you want. Of course the other upsides to that automation overshadow this a bit.

I'm of the opinion that if you need to log in to a server you've already failed.

Nobody should be ABLE to log in to servers by default, that's the way they become unicorns and not cattle.

"treve uploaded WHAT on the Big Bank's server?!"

Yeaah, that don't fly unless you're in a really seat-of-your-pants environment. =)

"dammit treve installed hyperland and riced the servers again" - sec team probably