From skimming the top level of comments, it seems most people don't like these tools. Fair enough. That said, on-topic, I just wanted to say that having tried

From skimming the top level of comments, it seems most people don't like these tools. Fair enough. That said, on-topic, I just wanted to say that having tried Puppet, Chef and Salt, I've found Salt the easiest to use. Straightforward installation (no messing with Ruby versions/rvm/etc.), really simple setup (systemctl start salt-master; systemctl start salt-minion; salt-keys -L; salt-keys -A yourbox; done), and the YAML-based configuration syntax has been a breeze to work with. Really quite pleased with it; it's made getting a few of my hairer boxes under control much easier than I expected (and much easier than I found with Chef or Puppet).