I agree that having standards and best practices is a boon, especially if they can be packaged up in an easy to use way. Like anything, Chef brings its own set

I agree that having standards and best practices is a boon, especially if they can be packaged up in an easy to use way. Like anything, Chef brings its own set of idiosyncrasies to the table. However, I don't like how it brings all of Ruby's idiosyncrasies along for the ride too. If you're not immediately comfortable and familiar with both ruby and the quirks of its ecosystem, you end up investing a lot of time into getting a development environment up and running (and having it reproducible by other members of your team). Most infrastructure tools, if they're any use, are rapidly evolving. Conway's law applies here, and the maintainability of Chef mirrors that of its ruby ecosystem roots - people tend to freeze dependencies rather than upgrade. That's an antipattern we don't need in infrastructure. Honestly I just think we can do better. For me, I'm not sure (read: I really don't know, I'm not being facetious) the costs outweigh the benefits, but for someone totally new, perhaps it helps them get stuff done faster.