I don't like the idea of not having my development certificates under control. They should be as secure as the production certs in my opinion.
I use PHPKi for that purpose, it's not pretty but easy to setup and it runs in my own environment.
I also strongly disagree. The real problem is that browsers can't use them as good as they should.
If you take for example a RESTful API, the verbs make totally sense and especially one of the mentioned verbs. PATCH is a great verbs if you use it like it was specified.
I personally like the idea of giving more freedom to chose the verbs.
Imagine you could use for a Twitter API something like:
FOLLOW /users/123
OpsWorks gives you better features, try out to start a small stack and then also have a look at the default cookbooks, there you can see what you can do with OpsWorks: https://github.com/aws/opsworks-cookbooks
it's easy, but also a bit hacky...
because opsworks triggers multiple lifecyle events and also distributes the chef config
if you solve the config problem, maybe with a static example you're pretty much done
you get a much better orchestration as you could with chef server
you also have much faster interactions, better life cycles
and to the searching... you get every information of evert machine under your fleet
it is much much more better the chef server