They aren't making 22k/yr is his point though. A US based dev, who is working 60 hours per week, and not making 50,000$+ is doing something wrong (or chose low pay for a cool company etc)
I have a webapp that I built, that utilizes rackspace's API and chef. I have a chef server that I use for all my configuration management, I have a Rails app that I use to talk to my chef server to manipulate machines, or rackspace's api to spin up machines, and I am building "triggering" into it (low disk space, high CPU do X). I am able to change IP addresses, spin up a machine with a specific stack etc. Granted this isnt the default chef-server, but the ability to do all this stuff, and not be locked into AWS is there.
"Chef's Data Bags are incredibly useful." Very true. Not having to deal with a DSL (which is a personal opinion) is the reason I chose chef over puppet. Plus the IRC channel seems to be more active.
Is the AWS opswork link broken for anyone else? I tried to view their pricing/sign up, but received 404's.
The author should hire a hacker for 100k/yr and let them work on whatever "is fulfilling" to them then, as it must be nice to look down on "optimizing your paycheck" when student loans exist. Fwiw making cool stuff and money are not mutually exclusive.
Another thing I think helps to explain how beneficial a good configuration management system is, especially if you have a good deal of systems, is to think of the servers as part of a botnet, and chef as the command and control.
Another benefit is abstracting away the management via a boxed in webapp. I manage about 2000 servers all running chef. Things like IPs, host files, firewall settings etc, are stored in databags, each server has its own databag that can be manipulated by a Rails app/the Spice gem (thanks Dan Ryan!). As someone who is tasked with managing all of this, along with bringing the less experienced employees up to speed, it is a way for me to normalize all of these things, and abstract things away enough that almost anyone can open a port up on any server, setup a rails app etc etc. And whomever takes over after me, will just have to read one set of docs, get an overview, and they should be able to follow the design patterns of how things are setup, much more easily then random ssh/bash scripts.