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Chef to be acquired by Progress

blog.chef.io

51–60 of 146 posts

Re: Chef to be acquired by Progress

#51

What's a good alternative to Chef?

There's pyinfra ( https://pyinfra.com , full disclosure: I built it). Ansible, Salt have been mentioned already. Also CFEngine and Rudder might be worth a look.

I just discovered pyinfra and I must say, it's really amazing in its simplicity.

Thanks a lot for building this!

Re: Chef to be acquired by Progress

#52
post #38

It's confirmed then. Absolutely nobody wants to buy Puppet. Anyone know why that fell through?

From my viewpoint, Puppet's portfolio is comprised of mostly half-baked stuff. You have Puppet itself, which is decent, and then an almost Google-level of weird stuff. They keep announcing new products but so far nothing seems to be sticking and they're all ludicrously expensive IMHO. Meanwhile, their core technology is kind of a dead end. More and more people are looking to manage containers and other serverless typ…

Even for those of us still managing VM fleets, containerization means that we can run a single OS image for everything, eliminating most of the need for a dedicated CM tool.

Re: Chef to be acquired by Progress

#54
post #34

I know nothing of Progress. Are they OSS friendly? I'd hate to see some of the OSS chef-managed tools die on the vine because of this.

From the Progress press report... "We have a long history of supporting open source communities so I am proud to say that we will continue to nurture the vibrant and thriving Chef open source community."

Progress had an open source division called FUSE (Apache Camel, ServiceMix, ActiveMQ, etc) for five years before selling to RedHat JBoss.

Some of its products (e.g. Telerik Kendo, NativeScript) have open source versions. There's also Fiddler Network and JustAssembly/decompiler.

Re: Chef to be acquired by Progress

#55
My 2 cents on Chef is that's it's long dead. The handful of people I know who used chef professionally all gave strong negative feedback about it and moved away to ansible.

While I can't comment on the exact problems because I didn't use it personally, there was a recurring mentions of losing states, seemingly destroying systems and configurations instead of setting things up. People were adamant that moving away from Chef was the best thing they've done lol, which I don't know about but I take at face value after the third person saying the same thing.

Re: Chef to be acquired by Progress

#56
post #34

I know nothing of Progress. Are they OSS friendly? I'd hate to see some of the OSS chef-managed tools die on the vine because of this.

From the Progress press report... "We have a long history of supporting open source communities so I am proud to say that we will continue to nurture the vibrant and thriving Chef open source community."

Ah, I should have looked for a press release on the Progress side of things. Thanks for that!

Re: Chef to be acquired by Progress

#57
post #34

I know nothing of Progress. Are they OSS friendly? I'd hate to see some of the OSS chef-managed tools die on the vine because of this.

In my experience, Progress is not very OSS friendly. Prime example: they don’t even have an open CLIENT driver to connect to their database. You need a license just to connect.

Re: Chef to be acquired by Progress

#59

What's a good alternative to Chef?

The alternative is ansible. Everybody I know moved away from Chef to Ansible and never looked back.

Historically there were 4 main configuration management tools: puppet/chef/ansible/salt.

The first two faded away. They're unarguably not the most usable and require to program in ruby. The next generation ansible/salt came out and arguably did better on every aspect.

I think it's fair to say that ansible is the safe standard (redhat acquired it few years ago, they maintained and extended it pretty well). Ansible is very easy to use and to integrate in anything as long as you have SSH access.

The only downside of ansible is that it can get slow with thousands of hosts to manage (gotta establish SSH connections). Salt can do better with large amount of hosts.

Re: Chef to be acquired by Progress

#60

My 2 cents on Chef is that's it's long dead. The handful of people I know who used chef professionally all gave strong negative feedback about it and moved away to ansible. While I can't comment on the exact problems because I didn't use it personally, there was a recurring mentions of losing states, seemingly destroying systems and configurations instead of setting things up. People were adamant that moving away fro…

I disagree that it's "long dead". Keep in mind that Chef (the company) has several different products too...Chef Infra (traditional configuration management) has fallen out of favor and Ansible seems to be the popular choice these days, but there are still a lot of big Chef Infra shops (e.g. Facebook [0]) that have invested heavily into configuring their environments using Chef Infra, which would require a good bit of investment to switch tools.

Plus, they have been diversifying their products in recent years with things like Habitat (application packaging/deployment) and security/compliance tools (InSpec).

[0] http://www.chef.io/customers

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