Hi,

never thought about the subtle differences of terminology. I found this article http://java.dzone.com/articles/deployment-automation-vs-0 which tries to bring light into the differences and seems to be interesting.

Rex calls itself a tool for "Deployment & Configuration Management".

On the start page of Chef I found: "...Chef can automate how you configure, deploy and scale your servers and applications...". So, the term "deploy" is there too.

On the Puppet site I found at http://puppetlabs.com/puppet/puppet-enterprise: "...quickly deploy critical applications...". Also there is the term "deploy" used.

Ansible says on the homepage (http://www.ansible.com/home): "...Ansible automates app deployment, ..."

On an introduction page of Salt (http://docs.saltstack.com/topics/) I found: "...Providing versatility between massive scale deployments...". So it seems that Salt is used for deployments too.

http://cfengine.com/ was dead at the moment when I tried to look at. Probably they tried to provision something.

But anyways: My total naivety in this domain let me subsume these tools or toolsets as deployment tools. What I meant are tools which help me to automate the installation of software packages and the required prerequisites on servers to run services/applications.

Thank you for pointing out that there are some important differences in terminology.

To your other comment: I totally agree with your opinion: "Just because these tools are written in Ruby doesn't make them poor.". But this was also something nobody insisted in.

Best regards
McA