Puppet or Chef? • Hacker News Board

Re: Puppet or Chef?

#21

Post by pyritschard » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 1:51 PM UTC

themgt wrote: post #15

We started off writing the bulk of our server setup/deployment automation in chef, and have since completely abandoned it The core problems we had with chef were: • worse than ruby: the chef ruby DSL is like some bastardized, crippled ruby - e.g. ruby_block{}, just uggh • way too slow & resource intensive: chef itself uses a lot of memory and CPU, has a slow boot time, and does stuff like execute apt for each desired…

you might want to look into pallet do achieve what you want if you're not afraid of clojure.

Re: Puppet or Chef?

#22

Post by krosaen » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 2:00 PM UTC

I like the topic, but have to say the article wasn't that great - the author didn't seem to have experience with puppet and had to be corrected in the comments section heavily.

While on the topic of devops, worth checking out:

http://palletops.com

http://linkedin.github.com/glu/docs/latest/html/index.html

Re: Puppet or Chef?

#23

Post by Hontano » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 2:16 PM UTC

nodata wrote: post #7

Hontano wrote: post #4

I never got on well with either. Puppet was mind-bogglingly slow (even locally without a master), both Chef and Puppet felt overwrought, and I prefer keeping dependencies to a minimum. Just a pointer for anyone else that doesn't have much love for either: I found myself happy and productive with Salt. Fast, simple, and lets me do what I needed with less Byzantine setup: http://docs.saltstack.org/en/latest/ There's al…

What was slow? The compilation time for the Puppet catalogs, or the run time on the clients? Compilation is way quicker in 3.0, averages a couple of seconds per node for me. Client side is parallel, not sure how it could be quicker.

Sorry, I don't recall in particular. It was about a year ago.

It was only a basic setup of a user account, a directory tree, and ufw. It took over a minute for either a first or subsequent run on a clean install of Natty. Considering how much more config I had to add and too little time to dedicate to investigating and speeding it up, I had to put Puppet aside.

Good to know 3.0 is a lot faster. I'll give it another look in future.

Re: Puppet or Chef?

#24

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 2:21 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Puppet or Chef?

#25

Post by AnthonyJoseph » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 2:21 PM UTC

I am a fan of chef, we use it at cloudpokerdb.com for all of our configuration management. The Ruby Scripts vs Config Files rings true (at least it did when I first compared the two a while back). Im sure you can do it with puppet, but chef allows us to auto-deploy and setup any type of server environment (using openstack) one could need, via a couple recipes, and databags.

Re: Puppet or Chef?

#26

Post by mpdehaan2 » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 2:23 PM UTC

smoyer wrote: post #3

I tried both and decided the answer was neither - I'd recommend giving Ansible serious consideration. ( https://github.com/ansible/ansible )

Thanks for the mention!

FWIW, front page is http://ansible.cc and there's a FAQ there that explains a bit more.

Docs are http://ansible.cc/docs

Re: Puppet or Chef?

#27

Post by cmer » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 2:29 PM UTC

For those looking for a dead simple alternative to Chef or Puppet, I wrote Shoestrap. It's a pure Bash, no-BS set of scripts. Doesn't have all the bells and whistles of Chef, but it might be enough for your needs.

https://github.com/cmer/shoestrap

https://github.com/cmer/shoestrap-example

Re: Puppet or Chef?

#28

Post by cmer » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 2:29 PM UTC

For those looking for a dead simple alternative to Chef or Puppet, I wrote Shoestrap. It's a pure Bash, no-BS set of scripts. Doesn't have all the bells and whistles of Chef, but it might be enough for your needs.

https://github.com/cmer/shoestrap https://github.com/cmer/shoestrap-example

Re: Puppet or Chef?

#29

Post by cmer » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 2:30 PM UTC

For those looking for a dead simple alternative to Chef or Puppet, I wrote Shoestrap. It's a pure Bash, no-BS set of scripts. Doesn't have all the bells and whistles of Chef, but it might be enough for your needs.

https://github.com/cmer/shoestrap https://github.com/cmer/shoestrap-example

Re: Puppet or Chef?

#30

Post by nodata » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 2:37 PM UTC

Hontano wrote: post #23

nodata wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was slow? The compilation time for the Puppet catalogs, or the run time on the clients? Compilation is way quicker in 3.0, averages a couple of seconds per node for me. Client side is parallel, not sure how it could be quicker.

Sorry, I don't recall in particular. It was about a year ago. It was only a basic setup of a user account, a directory tree, and ufw. It took over a minute for either a first or subsequent run on a clean install of Natty. Considering how much more config I had to add and too little time to dedicate to investigating and speeding it up, I had to put Puppet aside. Good to know 3.0 is a lot faster. I'll give it another l…

So from what you write it sounds like the time it took for Puppet to apply the configuration changes was the problem: to install all the packages you wanted, and then to configure and check them. This always takes time though, this isn't Puppet specific.