- Super simple declarative yaml configs
- Agentless. You needed to have SSH working anyway so Ansible just uses that. With ssh pipelining it's so fast.
- The community support is huge and extensive.
- They have a module for everything and development is constant and active, much of which from the community.
- Hardware and networking equipment can be provisioned just the same as a VM or OS image.
The list goes on. Definitely give Ansible a try.
Not to mention that Puppet totally freaks out if you have the exact same step configured the exact same way in two different modules and refuses to run ('just have package X installed, no further config'). Apparently you're supposed to write a whole new module at that point.
My guess is that Puppet would work better in large, complex environments as a sort of live-managed system, but down at my small scales (tens of servers), Ansible is far easier to develop and manage, I find.
This is first time I am looking at Ansible and I am instantly taken aback with if conditions in yaml. Looks so strange.