Having used all of the configuration management tools available, and I do mean all of them, I have found Ansible to be the most flexible, the easiest to execute arbitrarily, and the easiest to understand and package alongside applications. I would love to know what you're using that's better than Ansible and doesn't rhyme with poohbernetes.
I wholeheartedly agree. I've used CFEngine, BladeLogic, Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Salt in various infrastructure management tasks in the UNIX/Linux space. They're all shitty tools, don't get me wrong; they all have giant gaps in functionality especially when it comes to physical storage management. However, Ansible is maybe the least shitty. The cleanest and easiest environment to manage by far, was NIS/NIS+ with properly managed and groomed tables, and bash/ksh over automounter/NFS. I watched this work idempotently, and easily, across arch platforms and various versions of operating systems (some around since before i was born) without anyone on our small team breaking a sweat). Unfortunately, this architecture requires vigilance and a level of control that seems to have slipped away from the operations groups in recent years.
