Edit: I'm also having a difficult time trying to figure out how to get up to speed with chef in the specific context of opsworks, since most of the chef-specific courseware I can find assumes I'm using a hosted chef server, and I'm not quite sure how that overlaps with the opsworks flavor. It's starting to feel like I'll be at this for another week before I can get even a simple stack running.
As well as the reasonably good ansible documentation, checkout the ansible-examples github repo. ( https://github.com/ansible/ansible-examples )
There's a few initial 'conventions' to figure out (roles, group vars, playbooks), but then it's so incredibly simple to get into.
My dad is playing with a raspberry pi at home, wanting to set up a web kiosk thing. I'd been doing something similar a few months ago for work, so I send him my ansible playbook. He could follow it as if it were a plain text checklist/tutorial, without needing ansible at all. If he wants to automate it, he can.
That, I think, is one of the benefits of ansible. It's not a lot more work than just writing an overview of what you need to do in the first place, but with the benefit of it being repeatable and automated.
It's intended for use with Chef Solo but potentially the early sections on writing custom chef cookbooks may be of use.
Cannot stress this enough! There is a sea change happening and sysadmins run the risk of being swept away unless they learn about automation (puppet/chef) software and cloud infrastructure services (openstack/aws). My new years resolution is to release screencasts on these very subjects. I have already released one on Learning Puppet with Vagrant @ http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/8-learning-puppet-with-vag... if anyone is interested.
1) luckily backup seem to be reasonably automation friendly
2) "We do not support virtualization of any kind"
3) tied to hardware on one machine - f'n brilliant.
I personally haven't tried building environments on VMWare as I run pretty much everything in AWS. However, this presentation looks promising.