I have done several small deployments (under two dozen servers) with Chef, Puppet, and Ansible. I've also evaluated Salt and worked with other people's Bconfig

I have done several small deployments (under two dozen servers) with Chef, Puppet, and Ansible. I've also evaluated Salt and worked with other people's Bconfig systems. Ansible is the best for my situation, hands down. I no longer have any of the others in use. Ansible is easy to reason about - it's never surprised me once in use. You have about an order of magnitude less to learn when compared with chef or bconfig. Also, for setups with small target VM's, it's increadbly handy to not have to install a bunch of stuff on each server and make sure it doesn't conflict with anything else. But mostly it's that Ansible can be understood enough without devoting a couple weeks of your life to it. And you can come back later and understand what you have written.