Main thing on Ansible is the focus on multi-tier and process orchestration, without having to rely on coding up event paths between nodes -- admittedly it's a niche problem, but to me, deployment is as important as config management, and often harder. That being said you can write deployment in anything if you try hard enough, but I built what fit my brain and the particular needs of a few past companies deploying multi-tier web apps. While it is easy to have ad-hoc in the product (Puppet also does this with mCollective), it's a bit harder to be able to both model deployment and declarative state, and then make that into content you can hand over to a security auditor who doesn't know the language and he can say, yep, that's exactly what we want.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5244740
Main thing on Ansible is the focus on multi-tier and process orchestration, without having to rely on coding up event paths between nodes -- admittedly it's a niche problem, but to me, deployment is as important as config management, and often harder. That being said you can write deployment in anything if you try hard enough, but I built what fit my brain and the particular needs of a few past companies deploying multi-tier web apps. While it is easy to have ad-hoc in the product (Puppet also does this with mCollective), it's a bit harder to be able to both model deployment and declarative state, and then make that into content you can hand over to a security auditor who doesn't know the language and he can say, yep, that's exactly what we want.