You're totally right. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm not a sysadmin by trade. I've had the misfortune of having to deal with sysadmin work because I was the only one willing to dive in. So you mention Puppet, Chef, the distro's package manager of choice. These are all great tools but they have a learning curve. My point was that hosting apps on MS requires much less in the way of configuration and learning. You can just get things working.