I'll take writing stuff in YAML (Ansible) over all of the complexities and performance issues Chef brings. At megacorp a lot of my peers still hadn't let go of the button pusher mentality and were both inexperienced at coding and skeptical of automation. The problem with the power of ruby (as Chef exposes it) is that you've got the power of ruby aimed right at your foot.
On top of it, using ruby was a big pain when trying to work with rvm (e.g. for deploying ruby apps or developing ruby apps and running chef commands locally). Things may have gotten better since I last suffered through Chef, but we started running towards terraform + cloudformation.
On top of it, using ruby was a big pain when trying to work with rvm (e.g. for deploying ruby apps or developing ruby apps and running chef commands locally). Things may have gotten better since I last suffered through Chef, but we started running towards terraform + cloudformation.