[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.