[sohooo]

The widespread use of Puppet also has some benefits:

- lots of documentation

- Foreman ( http://theforeman.org/ , backed by Redhat) as a great alternative to Puppet Enterprise

- projects like GitHub's Boxen ( http://boxen.github.com/ ) to bootstrap your devel machine

- a large repository of modules available: https://forge.puppetlabs.com/

- a couple of books, training, conference, if you like those things

However, I'm very aware of those ugly warts, so there's a lot of potential for a successor.

[mpdehaan2]

Yeah, to us it's not just a configuration focus.

One of the focuses in creating Ansible was to have an easy-to-use system where it was just as easy to push apps, so you don't have to strap things like Fabric and Capistrano on top.

Another major example is how easy it is to do zero-downtime rolling upgrades on top, from the core language, without having to provide any glue on top to get there -- so it can easily say "target 50 out of my 500 servers at once", and work with load balancing and outage windows to walk across your infrastructure and upgrade production applications.