Amazon have released their new application management tool OpsWorks. This uses Chef to deploy and maintain instances on AWS. While it looks neat and I'm sure it will work for startups it's not something I could trust. I still like to get my hands dirty with server deployment and I try to use bare metal rather than virtual instances where possible. Also, from what I'm reading this tool is still very much a "beta" and is quite buggy.
The tool itself is not revolutionary, there are many other systems out there that do a similar thing. What is interesting though is that Amazon is offering this, once again improving the tools available without the need to use a 3rd party. Will this kill off competition or prompt the current providers to lift their game?
OpsWorks has brought up an interesting question. Now that AWS is using Chef and they have thousands of developers/sites using them, will Chef become the defacto standard and will other configuration management systems die out? There is a rumour that Amazon might offer Puppet support along side Chef, but that's just a rumour for now.
Personally I think Chef will increase in popularity due to OpsWorks, but I don't think Puppet et al will die away. Each system has their own merits and devs/ops will use whatever suits them and their environment.