[rdtsc]

I usually look at Salt as more advanced and perhaps a replacement of Puppet and other such declarative configuration system. I see Ansible as more of a replacement of a bunch of SSH + scripts.

[mpdehaan2]

Basically with Ansible all the declarative stuff in ansible is there and you'll be able to do all those things you want to do from Puppet and Chef.

However you can also do the app deployment stuff that you would typically do with Fabric or Capistrano.

The point really is to avoid using both, but in many ways, you could start with one, or only use one.

There are definitely folks in various stages of development where they start with one side of the coin and eventually migrate both sides.

But yeah, app deployment is definitely a focus, and I think for most people is a bigger driver than the basic config management stuff.

But is the declarative stuff there? 100%.