I did a whole bunch of research into DevOps and Chef (or Puppet) were the clear winners. That's really kinda sad because Heroku's model is just sooo much more pleasant as a developer... at least to start.

I'd really love to see a better abstraction than "idempotent wrappers for shell commands" which is what Chef and Puppet basically are.

Most applications are simple enough to run as a single process with a read-only file system and log to standard out. Surely someone could use the Heroku Procfile model a reasonable starting point and create escape hatches down to lower levels as you need them.