> My perception is that it wants to be a turnkey solution for people with little admin knowledge. We're using it for two reasons. One, we wanted a way to assis

> My perception is that it wants to be a turnkey solution for people with little admin knowledge. We're using it for two reasons. One, we wanted a way to assist in our migration to EC2 without doing a bunch of manual configuration. Two, we wanted a more sane way to scale out and provision our instances based on what had been working on Rackspace, but had all been manually configured. So, we had decent sysadmin experience and knew what the moving pieces were, but didn't want to keep going down the same path. If I understand correctly, your criticism is two-fold: 1) the documentation is too thin and 2) there is too much voodoo going on. The docs and surrounding blogs posts that we have found have been enough to make pretty good progress in 2-3 days with a relatively distributed architecture. James' blog post is designed to further help people new to it. Based on the brief amount of time that I've had to look at it, I didn't see too much black magic. It's basically just built on top of Capistrano and provides lots of configuration templates for different components and architectures. I'm sure there is a lot to improve but no complaints so far. > For people who know what they're doing there's fog, puppet and chef. This doesn't really move the conversation forward.