I'll be doing a follow up blog once I'm done building our deployment process for Chef in house. However, I'm not sure you're saying you've already ruled that ou

I'll be doing a follow up blog once I'm done building our deployment process for Chef in house. However, I'm not sure you're saying you've already ruled that out and are looking at Puppet instead? So what I come up with may not be very helpful. I think the general gist for both Chef and Puppet is you'll need to build the machine, build Chef/Puppet and their dependencies, then you can automate the rest of the build using them.