While I agree with a lot of what you said. In my experience, it was the need for orchestration that killed it but we are probably using different definitions o

While I agree with a lot of what you said. In my experience, it was the need for orchestration that killed it but we are probably using different definitions of "immutable", where in Chef context I think of it as the infrastructure. For me the killer feature of ansible for me was the ability to gate based on remote state, which really was incompatible with the foundational engineering choices that were almost ideal for its original target. When you were upgrading rabbitmq, postgres, etc... the view from other cluster nodes was critical, not the local view. Both chef and puppets tried to graft on what they called orchestration, but was really just batch jobs. Immutable infrastructure was fairly easy IMHO with chef if your architectural quantum was a machine, but not for situations where that quantum was a cluster, especially with data that needed to persist like with Cassandra etc...