After working in Chef for several years and fighting with both gem-rot and managing colliding chef-client and application ruby+rubygems+gem environments with RV

After working in Chef for several years and fighting with both gem-rot and managing colliding chef-client and application ruby+rubygems+gem environments with RVM... I was ready for something else. Also, our group just started working alongside another group that does not use cfg management; I wanted something that would be unobtrusive. At first I thought Salt would work, but the minionless mode was not really recommended. You lose a lot of the power of Salt when you do that. Ansible, however, is designed to be minionless. After using it for the last few months, I am (frankly) in love. The last time I felt butterflies like this for a tool was when I grokked git. Look, I can maintain my own ansible configurations (inventories, playbooks and roles), and the other groups need not be the wiser. They don't need to worry that servers are going to be reconfigured out from under them, since I am running my configurations explicitly. All they see is that I ssh'd in and did a bunch of stuff really fast. To work with my other groupmates, we just keep the files in git (just flatfiles, yes: just flatfiles). With git I have an audit log of everything that has changed (hosts that have moved environments, configurations that have been updated, etc). And like git it is as distributed as you want it to be. Want to run it from a central server only? Fine. Want to have your admins all run it from their workstations? Fine. Go for it. Even if the server is ancient or weird (ie. no python), I can still manage it with the raw module. Ansible gives me everything I want, with no fuss. It is so basic that I can do things the way I want to.