Ex Amazon here. Most grumpy system engineers did not disappear: we got hired by Google/Amazon/etc to build large-scale infrastructure... and sometimes sell it back to you as a service.

Believe me or not, most of the underlying infra does not run on the popular technology of the year. Far, far from it. That's why it works.

Modern devops, with its million tools that break backward compatibility every month sometimes becomes the running joke at lunch.

Would be interested to get your opinion on Puppet/Ansible/Chef/CFEngine/SaltStack

CFEngine is basic text manipulation, it's not comparable to the rest.

Puppet and Chef was the first generation. I wouldn't recommend. All the companies and people I know using Chef migrated away from it after many disasters. Nowadays, it's only mentioned in interviews to find out if candidates have real world fire fighting experiences.

Ansible is good. Used that for managing hundreds of machines at multiple jobs (some who migrated from Chef). It's been bought by RedHat, it's well maintained and I think it will have the brightest long term future.

Not sure about SaltStack. Never had the opportunity to try. I'd be a bit worried though on the long term prospect because I don't think they have much backing or user base.

> Ansible is great. Used that for management hundreds of machines at multiple jobs. It's been bought by RedHat, it's well maintained and I think it will have the brightest long term future.

A lot of folks I know have been bitten by Ansible's performance (Ansible has a central master that runs recipes on each node, rather than having nodes "pull" from a central master).

Ansible has a very, very low barrier to entry. You go from 0 to 100 in a very short time. It makes a lot of sense to use it when you just begin building your infrastructure.

Later on you can run Ansible Tower, deploy Ansible agents everywhere, and basically use Ansible under the same client/server model like all the other tools.

Salt is eerily similar to Ansible, it's just geared towards client/server. Being experienced with Ansible, it was weird at first to use Salt because everything looked familiar, yet slightly different.