> Many folks are actually not doing repeated config management every 30 minutes, though I realize that may be heresy to some Chef/Puppet shops, there's also a school of thought that changes should be intentional. So there is often a difference in workflow.
I think this is a false dichotomy. Those who believe runs should be performed frequently often implement this to revert manual changes performed by people operating contrary to site policy.
Not so sure, I've heard that quite a few times. The use case of rack-and-do-not-need-to-reconfigure-until-I-want-to-change-something seems quite common, but I suspect it's in often better organized ops teams where you don't have dozens of different people logging and not following the process. There is of course --check mode in ansible for testing if changes need to be made, as is common in these types of systems. Thankfully, both work, and you can definitely still set things up on cron/jenkins/etc as you like, if you want.
I think this is a false dichotomy. Those who believe runs should be performed frequently often implement this to revert manual changes performed by people operating contrary to site policy.