Salt: Like Puppet, Except It Doesn’t Suck
I'm not a web developer but I have a side-project that runs on a cobbled together EC2 instance. The server state is in theory documented in a set of of shell scripts and virtualenv requirements files.<p>I know that I should be doing this in a more robust way but whenever I try and read up on configuration management tools like Puppet and Chef, they're all described in comparative terms - Puppet does X better than Vagrant which does Y better than Chef, etc. I quickly lose patience and get back to digging myself into a deeper technical hole.<p>Is there a non-recursive explanation of what these tools are able to do and where someone like me should start?<p>Edit: Thanks for the helpful responses!