One of the oldest examples of this: https://github.com/infochimps-labs/ironfan. But yeah, Chef. Examples: https://github.com/infochimps-labs/ironfan-pantry/blob/maste....

I used to use this heavily back in 2013, 2014. Infochimps got picked up by eBay, afair. Hence why this was never developed further.

Start with hitting cloud provider APIs directly, then looking for value-add on top of that.

AWS CDK: https://github.com/awslabs/aws-cdk