For the starter... It only needs one single component to work , my computer!
Puppet/Salt you need a master server (with HA, load balancing, etc...) and a client running on every machine.
This by it self already add an order of magnitude more complexity than using Ansible.
And for Chef... Oh boy... you need a master server, a client running on every node plus a client running on your computer! (really... for me this by itself is already more than enough reason for me to plain refuse working with Chef).
Now... putting this details aside, the way that I use Ansible allows me to use the dynamic inventory feature (so... I don't store actual infra state on the automation) and to create playbooks that act as DevOps helpers if you may...
So... let's say that I need to setup a MongoDB Replicaset... I just call the `playbooks/provision-mongodb-replicaset.yml` playbook with the needed parameters and... the playbook takes care of everything. From the EC2 provisioning till the Hard disks partitioning (up to the RAID setup) going over OS settings, security roles, apps installations, etc..., till it goes, install MongoDB and create the replicaset for me.
All this with a single command from my computer without the need of anything else! =P
(and I have this `provisions-` and `update-` playbooks for everything that we run on my current job + for the things that I set up when freelancing... Including AWS only stuff like VPCs, or OpenVPN + VPC + Peering + etc...)
Mate... I manage hundreds of servers with it... including EKS Clusters lifecycles + creation of golden images, several databases stacks and AWS/Cloud provisioning.
It's far far far better than anything else... (specially Chef... It's light years ahead of Chef!)
Yeah... I have tmux, all my infras are on Ansible, etc, etc, etc... But there are times where I need to log to several boxes at once and when the time comes this tool is invaluable!
> We would still have to solve the politics of applying those technological advances uniformly rather than the benefit of a relatively small percentage of the species.
This is solved already... Capitalism makes it work across time.
(What is discovered now will with most certainty be available specie-wide in a couple of decades... and it's accelerating).
My team (DevOps) have a git repository where we put all our docs, post-mortems, etc...
Other teams uses Confluence, some uses GoogleDocs... etc...