[crdoconnor]

>I've never heard of ansible being referred to as a new generation. What do you think defines this generation?

IMO, it's three things:

* A push-by-default model rather than pull-by-default (that never made sense to me: option, maybe - default, HELL no).

* A focus on minimizing the dependencies (puppet has a ton of annoying unnecessary and attack-surface-increasing/ RAM-gobbling dependencies from the agent to the SSL authentication).

* Not using a DSL - just using YAML and an intentionally dumb templating language - helping to enforce a far cleaner separation between configuration and code (the divide can get muddied with puppet because its DSL is too powerful).