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Puppet vs Chef, Fight

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Re: Puppet vs Chef, Fight

#11

Post by sheff »

socratic wrote: post #5

Am I totally missing some obvious Chef documentation? The entirety of the documentation when I last looked seemed to be the wiki + the one 50-page O'Reilly book. I ended up literally printing out the wiki. (And the wiki seemed to be in a state of pretty extreme flux and/or disagreement with what blog posts suggested was best practice.) The business model of the companies promoting Puppet and Chef seems to be to charg…

I tried out both Puppet and Chef a while ago, and was also a bit confused by the Chef documentation when trying to do anything beyond the basics.

While not brilliant, the Puppet docs seemed better and when added to the Pro Puppet book ( http://www.amazon.com/Pro-Puppet-James-Turnbull/dp/143023057... ) are more than adequate, so I just picked Puppet on that basis alone, and have not had any issues.

Another useful tool , in conjunction with Puppet/Chef is Blueprint which lets you build configurations from existing servers , http://devstructure.com/ .

Re: Puppet vs Chef, Fight

#12

Post by bryanwb »

techscruggs wrote: post #9
socratic wrote: post #5

Am I totally missing some obvious Chef documentation? The entirety of the documentation when I last looked seemed to be the wiki + the one 50-page O'Reilly book. I ended up literally printing out the wiki. (And the wiki seemed to be in a state of pretty extreme flux and/or disagreement with what blog posts suggested was best practice.) The business model of the companies promoting Puppet and Chef seems to be to charg…

I was a bit confused by the "excellent reference documentation" regarding Chef, as well. The documentation I have read has been out of sync, occasionally contradictory piece-meal. I have yet to find anything more useful than just reading recipes. I wonder if the author knows of resources other than that book and the wiki.

I have had a very different experience from yours. I have found the Chef wiki to be consistently well written and consistent. Please note that I have only been working with Chef for the past three weeks, so they may have been brought into that state quite recently.

Re: Puppet vs Chef, Fight

#13

Post by techscruggs »

bryanwb wrote: post #12
techscruggs wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a bit confused by the "excellent reference documentation" regarding Chef, as well. The documentation I have read has been out of sync, occasionally contradictory piece-meal. I have yet to find anything more useful than just reading recipes. I wonder if the author knows of resources other than that book and the wiki.

I have had a very different experience from yours. I have found the Chef wiki to be consistently well written and consistent. Please note that I have only been working with Chef for the past three weeks, so they may have been brought into that state quite recently.

That would be a great surprise! I haven't been on the wiki form ~5 months, which does make my opinion a bit dated.

Re: Puppet vs Chef, Fight

#14

Post by rubyrescue »

techscruggs wrote: post #4

I use Chef, but without the server (chef-solo). I have a hard time stomaching the idea of dealing with a Merb application (an abandoned framework) that has some rather complex dependencies (couchdb & rabbitmq). That being said, plenty of peers have told me that they have not experienced any problems with running a Chef server. Maybe this means I should just fork up the cash for hosted Chef, but I don't see it as a 10…

Kevin Smith gave a talk a few weeks ago in Atlanta, that they're slowly removing those dependencies. He did specifically mention removing Couch and didn't mention Merb but based on his approach to deciding to remove Couch I'm sure he's going to address it.

Re: Puppet vs Chef, Fight

#16

Post by kbd »

While I often see "Puppet vs Chef", I never see Bcfg2 mentioned. Is its low mindshare related to its quality, it's exclusion from the set of Ruby-based config management tools, its origin in the government space, or its terrible name?

Re: Puppet vs Chef, Fight

#19

Post by techscruggs »

sheff wrote: post #11
socratic wrote: post #5

Am I totally missing some obvious Chef documentation? The entirety of the documentation when I last looked seemed to be the wiki + the one 50-page O'Reilly book. I ended up literally printing out the wiki. (And the wiki seemed to be in a state of pretty extreme flux and/or disagreement with what blog posts suggested was best practice.) The business model of the companies promoting Puppet and Chef seems to be to charg…

I tried out both Puppet and Chef a while ago, and was also a bit confused by the Chef documentation when trying to do anything beyond the basics. While not brilliant, the Puppet docs seemed better and when added to the Pro Puppet book ( http://www.amazon.com/Pro-Puppet-James-Turnbull/dp/143023057... ) are more than adequate, so I just picked Puppet on that basis alone, and have not had any issues. Another useful tool…

Have you used Blueprint? I am really interested in it. Honestly, it seems like a bit of magic to me and wonder how well it works and what its limitations are.

Re: Puppet vs Chef, Fight

#20

Post by Woost »

techscruggs wrote: post #4

I use Chef, but without the server (chef-solo). I have a hard time stomaching the idea of dealing with a Merb application (an abandoned framework) that has some rather complex dependencies (couchdb & rabbitmq). That being said, plenty of peers have told me that they have not experienced any problems with running a Chef server. Maybe this means I should just fork up the cash for hosted Chef, but I don't see it as a 10…

Just as a warning: If you/anyone decides to self host a chef server, you have to get the chef-server cookbook (or your couchdb will never get compacted) and you can't be running ruby 1.9.1 (or the server will have ~1 week uptime before crashing randomly)

As for the core being built on merb. I don't really notice it. You'll probably never have a reason to go into the chef-server internals to change something. Besides that, it's not like it has to be serving 30k requests per second or anything.

Otherwise, the Issues I've run into with chef-server: it was a little annoying to get everything installed and playing together. Couchdb + solr are very temperamental. After everything was running and stabilized(1.9.1 bad!) I've had no issues with it.

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