I started with Chef, then switched to Puppet, then to Ansible. They all do similar things, but for me, Ansible was simplest and most productive. Things I like

I started with Chef, then switched to Puppet, then to Ansible. They all do similar things, but for me, Ansible was simplest and most productive. Things I like best: Ansible relies on SSH and not a custom messaging system. Ansible requires no software to install/monitor on the remote systems. Ansible configs generally smaller and simpler, based on YAML and not a custom config file format. Also I found it to be simple to extend Ansible with custom modules written in Ruby and Bash.