> Ansible/Chef/Puppet is a package manager oriented at deployment at multiple nodes, which works with multiple GNU/Linux distros. These aren't really package m

> Ansible/Chef/Puppet is a package manager oriented at deployment at multiple nodes, which works with multiple GNU/Linux distros. These aren't really package managers, but configuration management, orchestration and desire state configuration tools. You can use them to execute package manager tasks (yum, apt-get for example) across one or more servers at the same time. Learning one of these tools is worthwhile. For example if I want to deploy a bunch of files to a specific locations across a farm of 100 servers then these are the tools for job. I'm learning ansible right now. The reason I chose it was because it's fairly lightweight and has a low barrier of entry compared to Chef or Puppet (for me anyway). The documentation is also very good. The sysadmincast chap recently knocked out four (free) videos introducing Vagrant and Ansible, they're quite good: https://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/43-19-minutes-with-ansible-part-1-4 https://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/43-19-minutes-with-ansibl... https://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/45-learning-ansible-with-vagrant-part-2-4 https://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/45-learning-ansible-with-... https://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/46-configuration-management-with-ansible-part-3-4 https://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/46-configuration-manageme... https://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/47-zero-downtime-deployments-with-ansible-part-4-4 https://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/47-zero-downtime-deployme... > Vagrant is a package manager. A wrapper around Ansible/Chef/Puppet. No, Vagrant is a tool for standing up virtual machines with repeatable builds. It's mostly used as a development tool so you can quickly build an environment on your desktop (e.g. VM's running on VirtualBox). You'd then, for example, pass the Vagrant script for your build around your team so that you're all developing against the same environment. It's also handy for rebuilding exactly the same VM again where you've maybe trashed it by accident. The videos linked to above will give you a sense of where and when to use Vagrant and Ansible.