I think you need to distinguish here different kind of systems.
a) Deployment of 'standard' applications like Drupal, Joomla!, Wordpress, etc. It makes sense to automate it once and let people "self service" In this case either the sysadmin is responsible for packaging those apps or they can get a third party "catalog" that you can deploy to your virtualized/cloud infrastructure (that's exactly what we are aiming for at BitNami, you can check it out http://bitnami.org/stacks/)
b) Complex multi-tier, in-house applications. Those are much harder to automate because they tend to be "one off" systems and will require 'traditional' system administration for a while.
c) Web companies that run a logical application across multiple servers (like Zynga, Netflix, though obviously most people will do so at a smaller scale). Here you need to use something like Chef or Puppet, there's simply no other way of doing so.
In other words, before the advent of cloud it was 'optional' for system admins to automate their work. Now it is expected. In that regard, I think automation is the real benefit that cloud computing has brought us (rather than the capex/opex and autoscaling that people often mention)
a) Deployment of 'standard' applications like Drupal, Joomla!, Wordpress, etc. It makes sense to automate it once and let people "self service" In this case either the sysadmin is responsible for packaging those apps or they can get a third party "catalog" that you can deploy to your virtualized/cloud infrastructure (that's exactly what we are aiming for at BitNami, you can check it out http://bitnami.org/stacks/)
b) Complex multi-tier, in-house applications. Those are much harder to automate because they tend to be "one off" systems and will require 'traditional' system administration for a while.
c) Web companies that run a logical application across multiple servers (like Zynga, Netflix, though obviously most people will do so at a smaller scale). Here you need to use something like Chef or Puppet, there's simply no other way of doing so.
In other words, before the advent of cloud it was 'optional' for system admins to automate their work. Now it is expected. In that regard, I think automation is the real benefit that cloud computing has brought us (rather than the capex/opex and autoscaling that people often mention)