## Requirements

* no upfront installation on remote/slave machines - ssh should be enough
* configuration templating
* environment requires/asserts, i.e. we need a JVM in a given version before doing deployment

## Candidates

Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Salt

## Excerpts from the net

[What is difference between docker, puppet, chef and vagrant?](http://www.quora.com/What-is-difference-between-docker-puppet-chef-and-vagrant):
* turns the configuration of an environment in to source code.
* That code can then be managed from within a VCS such as git or SVN so that  changes are attempted, shared, rolled forward and rolled back in a much more frictionless way than the traditional written specification documents or word-of-mouth configuration sharing (e.g. do this .... now try that ... no, OK then try this) described beautifully in Gene Kim's book The Phoenix Project.

## Ansible

Seems the choice of many that gets me curious what others offer in the space.