Puppets, chefs, and community competition

Chef and Puppet are both tools to manage system configuration. They not only manage
configuration files, but also packages, users, cron jobs, etc.: everything you need to get a fully
configured server. By providing a language they allow you to do things like: only install this file on
the server if the operating system is Debian.

Augeas is something Puppet and Chef can use to actually manage the configuration files on the
system. (And in fact, Puppet can use Augeas for doing just that do that.)