Configuration management tools are used to repeatably and consistently manage the configuration of systems and the services that they provide entirely through code. Many of them achieve this in three ways: an intuitive command line interface, a lightweight and easily-readable domain-specific language (DSL) and a comprehensive REST-based API that lowers the barrier-to-entry for integrations with other tools. Chef, Ansible, Puppet and SaltStack are popular, open-source examples of these tools.
I've seen many companies use these tools to create and modify, or provision, new infrastructure and configure them afterwards. In theory, this seems like a job that these tools are well-suited for given their advantages. However, my experience has shown that what actually happens is that much more code is written in order to take small edge cases into account. If I had to sum up what the resulting code often looks like, it would be something like this:
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