Ansible at its core is an orchestration tool that grew configuration management. It's not really the same beasty as Chef/Puppet/Salt. Salt is also pretty strong

Ansible at its core is an orchestration tool that grew configuration management. It's not really the same beasty as Chef/Puppet/Salt. Salt is also pretty strong here, while Chef is basically worthless for anything outside of config management. And maybe it's because we don't have good terminology around this, but your 'orchestration tools' include both backend and frontend tools for cluster management- Marathon sits at the bottom of Mesos, etc- it just seems like a weird group.