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I spent months working with Chef and made a good amount of progress but I feel like it drained years off my life. It's not because "devops" is even hard, but it's because the tooling is still horrible and the community is still split / documentation sucks in general / etc..

It actually killed my motivation to program in general so it's not like I'm some ansible fanboy too. I don't use anything now because I haven't deployed a line of code in about 2 months.

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Tooling is still difficult. I've used Puppet, Chef and Ansible all in production environments and though I like Ansible the best I just think none of them are all that great yet. Chef had some major issues between versions (entire suites of cookbooks made obsolete) and certain operations weren't deterministic. Puppet's DSL is just awful in my opinion though they have probably the best feature set . Ansible is definitely much simpler than the other two and easier to use, but a lot of the gotchas are just frustrating, e.g. jinja2 templating issues, a lot of new features that have unintended side effects when used with certain other features, where you can use conditionals and where you can't use conditionals seem arbitrary, etc.

Most people do need simple. Just having 2 or 3 servers is enough to handle quite a bit traffic and you can always vertically scale up to a certain point.

Once I recover from burn out I'll likely look into an alternative to Chef.

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