This lets you run containers using systemd, rather than having a complex, resource-hungry Kubernetes or Docker daemon manage them.
Podman is also capable of updating containers automatically, so the combination is something like Heroku.
Declarative tool for creating virtual machine images. This way you can bake all of the installed software into an image, rather than having to provision once a virtual machine boots.
This plus it's parent Terraform (open source version: OpenTofu) seem to be the best way to do infrastructure as code, at least at a certain scale.
A similar tool, for bare metal, is goldboot
Think
ansiblebut Python instead of YAML, and a lot faster.
This seems more up my alley than ansible.
For a server or two, I'm not sure if this is the way to go or something more complicated like Packer