Earlier quoted context omitted.
People regularly manage thousands of servers using Puppet or Ansible and version control. The structured text configuration files all UNIX-like software utilize makes this trivial. The strengths of AD are more related to client software, where many of them uses the policy mechanisms therein for management. Maintaining servers isn't what it does best. This is a large part of the reason why "the cloud" is pretty much L…
I use ansible and salt to provision servers. It works great. It has limited to no use to manage users and their passwords or authorizations, their control over machines, remote access to a share and zillons other usages you need specialized software for. AD has it all natively.
People with large environments that needs to be managed homogenously would beg to differ. How else would people manage these things large scale? It's exactly the kind of functionality that this software provides. Expressing rules in code might be radically different to someone used to a product like AD, but the learning curve is pretty quick and it is inherently more powerful.