[chucky_z]

I can only compare Ansible to Puppet, but I've had great success with rewriting a ton of hacky bash stuff directly in Ansible and having it feel much more 'maintainable.'

Perhaps if you're already using puppet/chef/salt it's not completely worth it to just suddenly switch to it, but it does feel "simple" to use; in my opinion it's worth use over Puppet solely due to the fact that you can really crank up the errors and get good messages.

[boundlessdreamz]

Yeah. Same here. I used puppet but it's documentation is horrible (at least for newbies),the errors are not informative, the simple stuff is complicated and the puppet did not run things in order IIRC. In the end, I had a very fragile puppet based system and some bash scripts which I could not rewrite in puppet.

I moved everything to ansible and couldn't be happier. The documentation is excellent and since ansible executes in the order you specify, the flow is much easier to follow

[vacri]

I had the same problem with puppet (which I ran agentless). One downside to Puppet that Ansible solved for me was no dependency graph. When Puppet breaks, it's error messages are sometimes completely uninformative as to why or even where. When Ansible breaks, you know exactly where it broke and usually why.

The second downside of Puppet was that it freaks the hell out and refuse to work if it sees the same command in two different places. If I have two roles and in those roles I'm installing a single package in the same manner, Puppet throws a wobbly and won't run, even if the conf for them is identical. The official answer is "write a module for anything used twice", but sometimes it's just so trivial.

In any case, I think Ansible is certainly much better suited to small deployments than (agentless) Puppet.