> Puppet (or Chef, Ansible etc) feel like only a tool a release automation engineer could love. The devil is in the details. Things like logs, packaging, and e

> Puppet (or Chef, Ansible etc) feel like only a tool a release automation engineer could love. The devil is in the details. Things like logs, packaging, and email sound dead easy, but they get complex fast. Trivial implementations ('just on my own workstation') are always dead easy, but making actual environments that scale sensibly is difficult and rapidly run into all sorts of edge cases. Configuration management tools are complex because configuration management is complex. You can always move with the herd and go Docker instead... but now instead of managing the configuration management tool... you're managing Docker, which is just as much overhead and has more edge cases you need to cater to. If you want simple tools, then constrain yourself and run in a managed environment (eg AWS's Beanstalk). As soon as you want environmental flexibility, you open a can of worms that can only be dealt with using a complex tool.