Well aware, but no one tool should have multiple responsibilities. Chef is primarily a configuration management tool and I keep that separate from a distinctly

Well aware, but no one tool should have multiple responsibilities. Chef is primarily a configuration management tool and I keep that separate from a distinctly provisioning tool like Terraform. Terraform is declarative rather than procedural like Chef and that's far preferred when trying to define what you have. Terraform & Ansible don't require me to run a master server or have agents on every machine either. Use tools where they're strongest. We used to use Chef years ago and replaced it with Ansible and Terraform and have zero regrets at 10^4 nodes. We also use Terraform for managing CloudFlare and all sorts of other providers. It has been a dream. Ansible does less and less work as time goes on for us and as we've moved to semi-immutable infrastructure. If we need to change something about a system, we'd rather replace it.