I deal with Chef at work, and I wish that was even remotely true. It's not a declarative system at all because it does not have the properties of being one. Nam

I deal with Chef at work, and I wish that was even remotely true. It's not a declarative system at all because it does not have the properties of being one. Namely the part about being able to specify the end state. Chef doesn't allow you to specify the end state. Instead it allows you to specify a list of actions to be taken during deployment. The end result is affected by bunch of external inputs sent from the Chef server and every single bit of state the target server is able to observe. It is therefore impossible to reliably determine the end state of the target server before deployment. Our team has been burnt by this more than once. Other similar systems are more or less the same. They have every hallmarks of being an imperative system.