I keep trying to get started with puppet/chef, but their homepages are so buried in mounds of enterprise products that it's incredibly hard to figure out how to get started.

Once I eventually figured out which of their indistinct products is actually the basic tool I then tried to follow their tutorials, which want me to install hundreds of megabytes of who knows what, set up heavyweight servers, watch video tutorials (!), and who knows what.

When I eventually slogged through all that to get to a minimally working setup trying to convert a few fairly trivial ansible plays for what I would have thought of as fairly standard stuff rapidly turned into "time to write some ruby"!

I gave up.