[makerbreaker]

Another benefit is abstracting away the management via a boxed in webapp. I manage about 2000 servers all running chef. Things like IPs, host files, firewall settings etc, are stored in databags, each server has its own databag that can be manipulated by a Rails app/the Spice gem (thanks Dan Ryan!). As someone who is tasked with managing all of this, along with bringing the less experienced employees up to speed, it is a way for me to normalize all of these things, and abstract things away enough that almost anyone can open a port up on any server, setup a rails app etc etc. And whomever takes over after me, will just have to read one set of docs, get an overview, and they should be able to follow the design patterns of how things are setup, much more easily then random ssh/bash scripts.