If you really want to make the most of a cloud, you need cloud configuration management software such as Puppet,  Ansible, or Chef. With these, instead of your system operators sweating over management programs meant for single, standalone servers, they can spin off dozens or hundreds of server instances in less time than it will take you to read this article.

I’ve already talked about Puppet, perhaps the most popular of these development/operators (DevOps) tools. Chef may not have quite as many fans, but with companies such as Facebook, Ancestry.com, and big data powerhouse Splunk using it, by anyone’s reckoning, Chef is is a serious DevOps program.
Chef: Cooking up great cloud servers. More >