Not all idempotent automation operations need heavy weight centralized state management like a deployed Chef server... Ansible has a lot less boiler plate in ma

Not all idempotent automation operations need heavy weight centralized state management like a deployed Chef server... Ansible has a lot less boiler plate in many scenarios. Indeed this is exactly why Chef even have 'chef-solo'/local mode to let you avoid having a Chef Server at runtime: https://docs.chef.io/chef_solo/ https://docs.chef.io/chef_solo/ While its a matter of opinion and will depend on problem you are trying to solve, I've found teams get productive on Ansible a lot faster and Chef Cookbooks often end up requiring significant maintenance. I have similar complaints with Puppet too. My biggest complaint with Chef is that its DSL so closely resembles Ruby that developers often assume the code in the cookbook is executed as pure Ruby rather than a DSL conversion; the transcoding phase in Chef is pretty complex and can lead to lots of debug head scratching.