Choosing a configuration manager for a Windows environment. Practical advice?

Question

System administration

There is a heterogeneous structure of servers, mainly on Windows + a couple on Ubuntu.
There is a question of automatic software deployment-updating, configuration and basic administration of this park.
To simplify the task, I want to implement some kind of free configuration manager.
Advise, who has practical experience in implementation and maintenance, which of the available bison:
- Puppet
- SaltStack
- Ansible
- Chef
- CFEngine is
worth implementing and studying in my case.
Meaningful implementation always needs more in-depth study.
I don't want to waste time on inapplicable architecture.
PS Active Directory is available, but it solves the distribution of software and a number of administration issues very inadequately (IMHO).
PPS I found articles available on the Internet mainly from 2016 and older, and a lot has changed in 2 years. Therefore, the opinion of practicing automatists is of interest)

Answer 1

I use Ansible + AWX + playbook storage on gitlab/gogs
Ansible pros:
Cons of Ansible:

• On a large number of machines (hundreds) people write about different problems, IMHO is solved by scaling AWX
  
• Not enough playbooks for Windows
  

Answer 2

Windows is still easier to steer group policies, Linux ansible.
Nothing has changed in two years

Answer 3

In general, sccm is supposed to be used if Windows is everywhere.
But I'm using puppet (3.8 so far) with foreman (reports, fact gathering, tables, peer signing certificates) + gitlab-ci with Windows. Of the minuses - strong gluttony of both the server and clients and a bunch of exceptions from ruby ​​when using a large number of scripts (cmd / powershell), executables, msi, chocolatey / nuget, etc., when they are distributed over different modules / manifests, and are not executed as a pair external scripts (if the role is clearly defined, for example, mssql + zabbix_client, and not a dozen software titles on one host, then there will be no such problems), and full tin with encodings, many ready-made modules in the official repository for Windows are simply insane. From the pros - it's easy to describe everything, make your own modules and manifests (IMHO), the entire infrastructure is described and self-documented, everything is fine with reports, you can normally edit HKLM by the way :), various updates can be rolled out very quickly, templates help a lot. Pappet has much less problems with Linux. But I also solve hellish cases with this, and not only server management (everything with them is once again simple and without problems with pappet), for example *cut out for ethical reasons*.