[hnlmorg]

I've used Ansible to manage bare metal. It worked great. I've used Ansible in high availability enterprise environments. Again, it worked great.

I'm not as big of a fan of Puppet but actually puppet also works great for on-prem systems given that's what it was originally designed for. If anything, Puppet makes less sense in the cloud than it does on bare metal.

I'm not disputing you have a complex problem but that just means you need to spend a little more time tuning your solution (not less time like you seem to assume).

And if you want my advice about how to approach a daunting build: break your problem down. First start with delivering easy systems which will have the least impact if it goes wrong. This is to get your confidence up in working with the tool. Then start picking the harder targets that will give you the most reward, so even if your project ends up unfinished you've still fixed the biggest problems in your org. Then work your way backwards until everything is fixed. After a while, some of the easier deliveries will become background jobs you can fit in between support queries or half day sprint tickets (depending on whether you Kanban or Sprint). Before you know it, you'll have everything automated and realise it was far less painful than it appeared before you'd started the project.

Disclaimer: I'm DevOps Manager who has transitioned several orgs to through this process :)