I'm always interested in chef/puppet alternatives but I was disappointed to hear the developers who work on Pallet haven't used either. That's not always a bad thing and you can often get a good understanding of library without actually using it, but at one point they characterised working with chef/puppet as "copy/paste" in reference to chef recipes. In my mind if you want to build a competitive library that will at…
Pallet was actually born out of frustration using chef to automate a website at my previous startup. The initial versions actually used chef solo, and added jclouds for node provisioning (we actually demo'd this to Opscode, back before Fog was integrated in knife). I am by no means an expert in Chef, but Pallet intentionally makes a very distinct set of design decisions. For instance, the reference to "copy/paste" yo…
There is also a new way of managing cookbooks more like the Ruby Bundler called Librarian https://github.com/applicationsonline/librarian