> However, the keyword here is "best effort". That is, it is in practice really hard to consistently bring a system from a random state to a given state X, beca

> However, the keyword here is "best effort". That is, it is in practice really hard to consistently bring a system from a random state to a given state X, because of the randomness of your starting state. This is the logic that BOSH follows. Why try to converge to a desired state if you can just recreate it from a known-good state? Why do you care about grooming individual servers when your goal is a distributed system? Configuration management tools make the classical sysadmin's life much easier. "I have a small group of giant expensive machines to run". The constant struggle of impinging chaos on the systems that Must Not Stop Ever.