Puppet or Chef?

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 also Salty Vagrant and Salt Cloud for local and remote provisioning.

Re: Puppet or Chef?

#5

Post by powatom » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 11:45 AM UTC

I've tried both Puppet and Chef. Puppet fits my mental model more, but I had for more success with actually getting Chef up and running.

Puppet, on the surface, has less 'messing about' to do in order to get things running - but my experience was that I encountered a few issues which basically caused me to spend way too much time mucking about rather than working.

Ideally I would like to use Puppet, I feel like it's cleaner and it seems more 'logical' to me at least - but I only have actual experience of Chef working, so make of that what you will!

Once Chef is up and running, it absolutely flies, which is always good!

Re: Puppet or Chef?

#6

Post by ivanvanderbyl » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 11:46 AM 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 )

Another one is Babushka, for serious simplicity and speed http://babushka.me

Re: Puppet or Chef?

#7

Post by nodata » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 12:06 PM UTC

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.

Re: Puppet or Chef?

#8

Post by reinhardt » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 12:25 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 Ansible reference, looks interesting.

Re: Puppet or Chef?

#9

Post by bwb » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 12:29 PM UTC

We are currently building out Chef to handle change management for 3000+ servers :), loving it so far but we are also a RoR house too.

Know of another big hosting company using Puppet and they love it, for about 10k+ servers.

Re: Puppet or Chef?

#10

Post by jacques_chester » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 12:34 PM UTC

I recently had occasion to look at Cfengine, Chef and Puppet.

I chose Puppet.

http://chester.id.au/2012/06/27/a-not-sobrief-aside-on-reign... (scroll down if you don't enjoy my windbaggery).

The short version is: Puppet best fits the way I think about how such systems should work. Despite ostensibly belonging to the same genre of system, the three of them have subtle but very important differences.