This is the first I've heard about Chef. I've spent some time with puppet, and it looks like Chef is trying to fix a lot of the pain points. Particularly, getting rid of that awful external DSL and using straight ruby.
I got started with Chef today and it's great.
It's organized into recipes, and you can share cookbooks (see the official one, it has plenty of recipes for common things). I also like using erb templates for config files.
In the article he claims EC2 is $27/month. Was there a recent price reduction?
From the article:
"With a reserved instance (you pay for a whole year in advance) the price is $325 or $27/month. But that doesn't include Data Transfer, EBS, Elastic IP or S3 costs. Got that info from https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing"
He computed incorrectly. He didn't include the usage, with the reservation cost. A reduced usage still applies. The correct price is...