[benfortuna]

Scripting is not in the same league as Puppet, Chef, Ansible, etc. Automation at scale required the development of tools like these.

[drewcoo]

Not scale in terms of your company scaling. Only scale in terms of number of companies using the same off the shelf tooling.

The difference with those tools is that they were off the rack and not bespoke. There were plenty of bespoke systems before, used in fewer places because bespoke systems are expensive.

[pjmlp]

Most of those predate DevOps phenomenon, and have roots in systems administration.