Chef is a great tool. I really love it. But to take full advantage of it, you need a Chef server (either build one yourself or have it hosted with Opscode (which we did at my last job). For small businesses and/or personal server(s) of very small scale (I’d suggest up to 3 to 5 servers at most), a nifty tool like LittleChef can really be quite useful. But if servers you manage ever grows more than a handful, I’d highly recommend hosted service like Chef to keep your sanity.