Agreed. I like to use Chef Solo, orchestrated by Karamel, to spin up stateful services (like databases, Hadoop, etc). I think the big win if we get there will

Agreed. I like to use Chef Solo, orchestrated by Karamel, to spin up stateful services (like databases, Hadoop, etc). I think the big win if we get there will be using Docker to provide images and portability, chef (or puppet) for configuration, and something like Karamel to orchestrate and provide concise cluster definitions with GitHub as the artifact server.