[dkarapetyan]

I don't know either. Puppet, ansible, salt, and friends are in the same boat. The best part is that the special syntax doesn't buy them anything. They just end up being gimped languages for expressing some kind of dependency graph.

[bostik]

All configuration management systems suck.

They all suck in equal measure, but each in a different fashion. You can only try to pick the one tool that sucks the least for your particular use-case and hope that two years down the line you made the right choice.

[dkarapetyan]

This isn't much of an argument. That's like saying all programming languages suck and it's a crapshoot. It's not. There are design principles that work and scale to large scale systems and then there are things that don't.

As far as I'm concerned Chef is the right way to do configuration management. Everyone else with their YAML DSLs is doing it wrong. Expressing dependencies between resources does not require specialized external DSLs and sometimes you need to do imperative things to get to the end which is either impossible or just horribly convoluted with any tool that tries to hide complexity behind a markup/serialization language.