The configuration management landscape is full of good ideas but there are too many of them and most of them end up being the equivalent of C++ for infrastructure automation. You can do anything and everything in 10 different ways that are all equally complex. Chef for example has 9+ levels of attribute overrides ranging from X different cookbook attributes to Y different role attributes. I ask why are there so many override levels and there is no good answer because I've never needed more than 3 levels of attribute overrides. There's more but the override levels on their own are already enough headache. Then there are the ones that use a custom configuration language. I enjoy writing and using DSLs as much as the next guy but the whole point of DSLs is to keep them away from the Turing completeness threshold. As soon as you cross it there is no point in having one. All of the tools commit this sin except for Chef which just embeds the DSL in Ruby.

There is also the fact that none of these tools actually address cloud provisioning. They all work really well once you have your entire topology mapped out but do nothing to actually help with building that topology. That's why I'm hoping Terra takes over because it addresses this aspect of configuration management and I rather use something from Hashicorp than some other vendor.