I love Ansible. After having used puppet and chef at the company I work for, everyone was thrilled about how easy and boiler-plate free Ansible is.
Chef is great for bigger architectures, but if your goal is to provision a limited set of servers and document it's configuration in a readable format, Ansible is truly fantastic.
Thanks! BTW, I'm not sure limited applies. There are several setups with thousands of nodes and users doing some pretty complex multi-tier orchestration magic (N-tier, load balancers, monitoring outage windows, Jenkins, all integrated, etc). And you've got ansible-pull for mega-large scale if you want.
The thread starter meant, AFAICT, that Ansible scales down nicely. If you have 3-4 boxes, maybe 0MQ is overkill, and even running a a Chef client constantly is overkill.
Exactly. Having to install chef and all it's dependencies to install nginx and a few config files in the end feels really wasteful. With ansible, there are zero server-side dependencies.
Chef is great for bigger architectures, but if your goal is to provision a limited set of servers and document it's configuration in a readable format, Ansible is truly fantastic.