ansible rant

I'd strongly recommend you check out SaltStack. In addition to config-management, my group has been using the heck out of SaltStack's orchestration and remote-management capabilities. Most of our release/deploy stuff is self-serve now via TeamCity (but any pretty web interface would do in its stead.)
We were *very* happy to go from Chef + Fab to an all-Python stack.

This is speaking as a grumpy sysadmin who's inflicted various combos of CFengine, Puppet, Chef, ClusterSSH and BASH-asshattery on my poor hosts. :)

I have some fiendish ideas for using some of the new reactive features, but I want to test them before commenting further.