[larrywright]

I'm not the parent, but I've used both (Chef more heavily - going on 6 years, and I'm certified as a Chef trainer).

Your assessment is roughly correct, Ansible is definitely easier to get started with, and if you just want to manage a small number of nodes that you have SSH access to, it's a good choice. Chef has a larger ecosystem, and a different communication model (VMs under management communicate out to a Chef server over HTTPS, no need for inbound ports to be opened). The tradeoff is a slightly longer learning cycle. I'm biased towards Chef because it's what I know, but having spent some time with Ansible it's a good choice for some use cases.

[rdtsc]

Thanks for explaining. We are using Chef heavily and we like it, but some people have been experimenting with Ansible so we started to wonder how they would compare in general. The concensus seems to be to stay with Chef.