My experience with Ansible is that I have to write a dozen lines of yaml just to ensure permissions on a bunch of files. (But Puppet and Chef scare me even more

My experience with Ansible is that I have to write a dozen lines of yaml just to ensure permissions on a bunch of files. (But Puppet and Chef scare me even more.) The tools in this space feel like very thick abstractions on top of commands and configs you have to understand any way, to get the results you want. The console output Ansible produces is also truly horrible. Instead, I now maintain a single shell script for our servers. It's maybe a couple hundred lines, half of it heredocs containing small config snippets. I will definitely be looking at this tool later.