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Chef to be acquired by Progress

blog.chef.io

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Re: Chef to be acquired by Progress

#81

Post by joaquin2020 »

xorcist wrote: post #68
fooqux wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Puppet is a great tool for managing containers, and so is Chef. There is nothing inherently good about YAML. There is less buzz around those tools now however, and people tend to gravitate to other tools which are easier to get started with. They may end up "silent heroes" (much like Ruby itself, I would say) or they may end up replaced by other tools. The concept of state as text in version control is a timeless con…

> Puppet is a great tool for managing containers, and so is Chef. There is nothing inherently good about YAML.

I am not sure what complex config state management solution brings to the table for immutable containers. The state is immutable, so there's nothing to manage after deployment. It's like using an atom bomb to take out a zit.

Puppet/Chef in their glory days, pre-cloud pre-container, excelled at managing desired state across numerous mutable static systems. With immutable solutions, Puppet/Chef are both cumbersome and expensive.

Re: Chef to be acquired by Progress

#82

Post by PixyMisa »

oasisbob wrote: post #67
PixyMisa wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My job for years was developing and supporting Progress applications mainly on AIX. So much less crap to deal with than is common today. Things actually worked .

My experience with AIX as a sysadmin ca 2005 was dramatically different. Things "worked", but everything was OLD. CLI tools had bugs and warts that GNU figured out decades previously. I remember having to use obnoxious workarounds when tooling broke because 'find' wouldn't even work properly once you exceeded a certain number of files. (Several thousand, IIRC) And that curses-based wrapper for doing administration ta…

Ah. I was off AIX and onto Solaris, and then Linux, by 2005.

Re: Chef to be acquired by Progress

#83

Post by geerlingguy »

TinyRick wrote: post #60
user5994461 wrote: post #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 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 o…

The fact that I've never heard of Habitat or InSpec means either they're extremely niche and not as popular as I think Chef would've hoped, or I'm completely out of touch with both app packaging and sec tooling.

I'm hoping it's the former, but I wouldn't be too surprised if the latter since the 'enterprise' ecosystem of cloud tooling has grown exponentially in the past decade.

Re: Chef to be acquired by Progress

#86

Post by sundars »

z9e wrote: post #35

What is Progress’s track record with open source? Recently a lot of people have had to switch to Cinc if they wanted to continue using Chef without paying an enterprise license. As one of those people, I just hope they don’t try to close the doors on the Cinc community.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24409490

Re: Chef to be acquired by Progress

#87

Post by Riverheart »

stevekemp wrote: post #63
schoolornot wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They made some serious missteps imho re: strategy. releasing and then not marketing razor server when everyone was shifting to VMs, halting development of the open source dashboard, not really investing in containerized environments, kubernetes, etc.

Halting development of the open source dashboard really hurt me, so I setup my own little alternative: https://github.com/skx/puppet-summary/ Simple to deploy, configure, and use. Although I always felt I should perhaps have based my work against the puppetdb to get a more dynamic "dashboard" it certainly replaced the old dashboard, and being only a single binary it is simple to install & manage.

Foreman too heavy for the use case?

https://www.theforeman.org/

Re: Chef to be acquired by Progress

#88

Post by joaquin2020 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #5

What's a good alternative to Chef?

In the scope of config state management across mutable systems, SaltStack is the closest.

When doing immutable infra, where managing desired state is only at deploy time, then Ansible is by far more popular. Beyond that you get into container scheduling-orchestration platforms.

Others mentioned Terraform and Pulumi, which manage cloud resources, where Chef manages mostly system resources. Once upon a time, there was an attempt with Chef Metal, and later rebranded as Chef Provisioning, which are drive by chef-solo (or chef-zero) and use fog driver. The end result was something that was so gawd awful terribad, unstable, and unpopular. Instead of Chef investing to improve it, Chef started promoting Hashicorp Terraform over their solution.

Re: Chef to be acquired by Progress

#89

Post by joaquin2020 »

stevekemp wrote: post #64
Fizzadar wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

CFEngine never really seemed to recover from the 2.x to 3.x migration. I know that's around the point I switched my fleet from CFEngine to Puppet. I toyed with a simple puppet-alike, written in golang, called marionette (in hindsight a terrible name): https://github.com/skx/marionette/ It isn't anywhere near as complex, or featureful, but starting with golden AMIs it allows the necessary changes that I need in a cons…

> I toyed with a simple puppet-alike, written in golang, called marionette (in hindsight a terrible name)

Well, yeah, especially as Puppet has a well known solution named Marionette Collective

* https://puppet.com/docs/mcollective/current/index.html * https://choria.io/docs/about/mcollective/

Re: Chef to be acquired by Progress

#90

Post by pnutjam »

user5994461 wrote: post #59
PaulHoule wrote: post #5

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 s…

IMHO opinion, another big benefit of ansible is how usable it is from the start. Granted, you can build some bad habits if you're not careful, but being able to step into ansible and use it for stuff without a big building project is a huge advantage.
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