I used to reach for shell scripts to configure servers, then Puppet, then Salt, and then finally to Ansible. Configuring servers declaratively is such a massive improvement over shell scripts. The fact that Ansible is agentless is also very nice and works very well for when you only have a handful of servers.
Only thing I dislike is YML, which I think is yucky!
Only thing I dislike is YML, which I think is yucky!