I don't really agree with this. If you're defining a whole crazy master/agent relationship with Puppet then it's overkill for them, no doubt.

There's a reason many Vagrant boxes I see use Puppet to instantiate though: It's friggin simple to get started with. More advanced configurations might even end up requiring you to build your own modules and extended manifests, but I expect this configuration detailed in the article would probably amount to a couple hundred lines for the entire manifest.

I think this also underscores one of the things I like the most about Puppet (instead of Chef, which is a fine CM system as well); It's easy to get started with but powerful enough to get things done down the road. Honestly, there's never a better time to start working with Puppet than from the very beginning of a project!

Overkill for now. But it's best to learn the tools you will need while things are still simple. You know how things should get set up and can ensure that what you're telling Puppet/Chef to do achieves that.

If you wait until you've got a more complex configuration, you're fighting both the tool syntax and system setup requirements. Not to mention the clock that's ticking and telling you that you needed to be all up and running yesterday.

What do you recommend for simple configurations where you still want the repeatability/documentation/versioning tools like Chef/Puppet provide? Shell scripts?

After building a half dozen one-off sites, each with a simple, single-server config, I found that going sitting down and learning Chef was helpful for jumpstarting the next project. All of the basic needs are the same: nginx, unicorn, postgresql, etc, and I was tired of reading through my jumble of system configuration notes. Yes, I could have baked AMIs and created new AMIs, but not everything was Amazon-based.