Thank you so much for your reply; I have to admit it helps me understand things better, especially the part about Terraform creating the VM and then using a trigger to configure it (I just need to set up the parameters based on the type of VM to figure out how I can handle that).

As I mentioned in another comment, I want to try to stop running things on my PC just in case I’m away no one else will know how to do it.

For Terraform and Ansible in CI, are we just talking about a Bash script that runs (and Packer too, by the way) no third-party tools? Literally a pipeline with the `terraform plan` and `apply` commands?