Automated configuration management can be scary. Not because there weren't great tools out there, Chef and Puppet are awesome, but they are overly complex, require the installation of daemons and the documentation is horrendous.Salt entered the mix awhile ago, and I've been playing with it a bit, it's certainly a lot simpler, but it still requires a daemon, and it lacks a little functionality, still an all around great tool.
Enter Ansible, I hadn't really heard about it, but I'm setting up a new project now, and wanted it to be programmatical, and I found Ansible. After reading some documentation about it, and playing around in a day, I have it doing most of the things I want already, and it's working great. It is logical, and uses YAML, so it's easy to write, and does everything you want, over SSH, so no need to install a daemon. From a stock base Ubuntu image on AWS I can run an Ansible playbook and have it set up in minutes/server instead of hours, and it makes maintenance a much happier, trackable (via git commits) task.
If you've been looking for a great infrastructure automator, I definitely recommend www.ansibleworks.com They have a pay for UI that looks quite nice, but I find the OSS command line is very good as is.
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