I would have a hard time recommending Chef and Puppet unless you wrap your deployed unit in a .deb or .rpm file with pre and post install scripts. Puppet is no

I would have a hard time recommending Chef and Puppet unless you wrap your deployed unit in a .deb or .rpm file with pre and post install scripts. Puppet is not really great at executing a sequence of steps because it is declarative: you can always express sequence as dependencies (e.g., reload nginx when file X has changed), but for fine grained steps (e.g., create a softlink for the latest version of your code), it's less convenient. It's also slower than a Fabric script. If I want to revert to a previous version, I just do "fab revert myapp". With puppet I would have to rerun the puppet agent/change a manifest/change the version in my rpm repository/... We heavily use puppet to manage our servers, but we rely on Fabric for deployment tasks.