[VSpike]

I started looking at Salt and really liked what I saw, but the first task I had to do was to provision some Windows Servers on Rackspace or AWS and configure them. Like the other commenter, I wish I didn't have to deal with Windows but I'm stuck with it. I found Saltcloud a bit bleeding edge for a newcomer to configuration management (although improving all the time) with Windows being its biggest weakness. When it comes to configuration, it also seemed to me (admittedly with limited experience) the Windows support in Salt is a poor cousin rather than an equal citizen. Don't get me wrong, it's good they have it at all, but you'll need to do a lot more work yourself. I plan to look at Chef next as a possible alternative since the Windows support seems more mature. No comments on Chef yet so I'd be interested to hear anyone else's experience with it, especially for a newcomer to config management tools.

[anentropic]

I rather hated the Ruby DSL in Chef... turned me off the idea of DSLs in general in fact.

I haven't used Saltstack but the use of (jinja-)templated YAML or just plain Python for state files seems like a big plus.