[hosh]

Ah, so if by client you mean end-user devices ... yeah. I am not sure Chef or Puppet solves it. On the other hand, my world has been focused on web and mobile apps, so end-user apps tend to use browsers that are already on the end-user device.

I'm not sure what you mean by clients though and how that relates to VM sprawl.

It's true that some developers are convinced that sys admin is something they can do themselves. However, it goes the other way around too, that sys admins think they know what is best for the app. It's better all around if devs actually gain an understanding at the issues with sys admin, and sys admins get some development skills.

As far as the server-side goes, once nice thing about using something like Chef or Puppet is that you can create a miniature version of the production environment on the developer's laptop. You won't run into the same kind of issues when you are scaling out, but you can at least make sure that you are running everything rather than always developing things in isolation.