> What Puppet et al brings to the table is a bit of structure and best practice. > But the big win with a configuration management tool is not even in the tool

> What Puppet et al brings to the table is a bit of structure and best practice. > But the big win with a configuration management tool is not even in the tool itself. It's having a central database of _all_ configuration in every environment. I agree that is the big win. Though in theory you don't need a configuration management tool to get it. Just sufficient discipline and attention to best-practices. What the config management tools provide, here, is a framework for combining "site-wide" configuration, "local/discovered" facts, and "human-assigned" roles and classes and exposing it all, consistently, to a specialized scripting language. The library of modules/cookbooks/etc. also often take care of a lot tedious logic/details that would otherwise have to be in the code (although this part can still get in the way...).