I was interested until I saw the crypto stakes to vote on changes baked in.

Similar setup here with a 7900xtx, works great and the 20-30b models are honestly pretty good these days. Magistral, Qwen 3 Coder, GPT-OSS are most of what I use

Yeah, similar sized environments here too, but had good experiences with Ansible. Saw Chef struggle at even smaller scales. And Puppet. And Saltstack. But I’ve also seen all of them succeed too. Like most things it depends on how you run it. Nothing is a perfect solution. But I think Ansible has few game breaking tradeoffs for it’s advantages.

Wow, huge disagree on saltstack and chef being ahead of Ansible. I’ve used all 3 in production (and even Puppet) and watched Ansible absolutely surge onto the scene and displace everyone else in the enterprise space in a scant few years.

Ansible is just so much lower overhead and so much easier to understand and make changes to. It’s dominating the configuration management space for a reason. And nearly all of the self hosted/homelab space is active in Ansible and have tons of well baked playbooks.