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.