The real world tends to have a diversity of hosts and an automation system that only partially applies is in many ways worse than none at all. I ended up with

The real world tends to have a diversity of hosts and an automation system that only partially applies is in many ways worse than none at all. I ended up with Ansible because it seems to require nothing on the far side but python2 and ssh. Everything else needed a specific version of a specific client software. CFEngine was particularly awful in a diverse setup, fighting SSL to make puppet work was never fun. I haven't found anything Ansible won't talk to, or can't be made to talk to eventually. I used Puppet for a bit less than a decade before switching to Ansible maybe two years ago, and I don't miss fighting its SSL at all. I miss when the puppetmaster would randomly crash and I'd find out when a deployment failed or worse failed partially, or when the puppetmaster process would take 5 minutes to start because, well, I donno why, but it sure was annoying. One interesting anti-pattern I saw over the years was people using puppet (or ansible or otherwise) as the worlds weirdest version control system. You can git pull a release branch, or you can write 10K custom lines (no kidding) of automation software to replace one line of 'git pull'. Depends if you're paid by hour/LoC or not. The borderline between "this is managed with ansible/puppet/wtf" and "this is managed by living in a git repo" can be annoyingly fuzzy and going to either extreme doesn't turn out well...