second that: if I was sole admin for a whole cluster/farm of machines (n>50) with a equal configuration on a lot of them (or desktop-clients), I'd probably look

second that: if I was sole admin for a whole cluster/farm of machines (n>50) with a equal configuration on a lot of them (or desktop-clients), I'd probably look into saltstack. For me ansible is perfect, I have some private services on a variety of VPS (read: mail & co for me and family, because the Internet is not yet another cloud...) and at work I use it for syncing my config and installing software on our lab-cluster as well as in my ${HOME} on the local HPC-center. Saltstack/Puppet/Chef won't help me with any of these, as I'd need multiple server for control alone. Logic in yaml sucks though – I'd probably jump ship anytime anybody provided the same thing (e.g. plain configuration management for "classical", non-cloud setups) with a real DSL (be it Python-based or whatever).