Can someone explain to me the benefits of moving to chef or puppet as opposed to say my current approach of writing deploy scripts in pythons fabric (basically

Can someone explain to me the benefits of moving to chef or puppet as opposed to say my current approach of writing deploy scripts in pythons fabric (basically ssh and file operations library)` I can't talk about chef but puppet basically gives you a declarative language to specify the end-state in which the server config should end up as. So you say something like "the apache server must be enabled and running" and then when the client runs it makes sure the state matches that. So if for some reason apache gets disabled (say a new version of the package disables it) the next time the client runs it will right that. I have even used Puppet but I could not get over the feeling I was placing a lot of trust in an agglomeration of system in provided recipes You don't have to use the recipes. I had the same worry so what I did with my own puppet usage was set a rule that I won't copy recipes from anywhere and just use puppet to do the same things I would do directly on the server but describe them using puppet so I can replicate them later. This has worked great for me. I still have to learn all the details of how to configure everything on the machine but I now have a version controlled log of how I've configured everything and I can very easily apply the same recipe between two machines. And even though I don't use copied recipes puppet itself abstracts away a bunch of stuff. So for example "make sure apache is installed" is implemented with apt in ubuntu and rpm in redhat. So if I wanted to repurpose my recipes from ubuntu to fedora I'd have to recode paths and package names but I wouldn't have to figure out how to interact with the package manager, what the command to create a new user is, etc.