[sergiosgc]

We switched away from puppet towards Salt. The broad stroked opinion is that salt covers all of puppet 's use cases, with advantages in terms of both performance and extensibility.

It is idempotent; there is a central configuration db (a couple of options, actually; we use pillar, a YAML set of files for its simplicity). Exported resources are handled a bit differently (you pull data from servers at config time instead of pushing at export time) but cover the same functionality. The same functionality covers software configuration inventory.

Where it excels is in performance. Our deployment runs on puppet took some 15min, salt handles them in 30s.

I also like its codebase. It is clear and well documented, easy to extend. I am biased towards python instead of Ruby, so take my opinion with a grain of salt (heh:-)