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puppet versus chef

I would like to learn more about both "products" and identify strengths or weaknesses of either product and hopefully come away with another useful skillset.  As an added bonus, I'll become more familiar with Ruby at some point along the way.

This is my initial write-up... which began 1 day after I decided to start looking into this particular challenge.
I anticipate I will have a much different perception in a few days or weeks.  Unfortunately the post will follow a somewhat familiar format.  The format helped me become informed when others used it, so I guess it makes sense that I would do the same.

One thing I have to comment on.. it's is amazing how pleasant the Puppet folks seem to be towards Chef, and vice-versa.  Makes me almost feel guilty picking one over the other. ;-)

Manuals and documentation
Winner: Puppet
So, using the Google, BarnesAndNoble.com and KindleStore I found the following:

Puppet - There are a few publications out there, available both electronically and in paper form.
  -- Pro Puppet (James Turnbull, Apress Publishing)
  -- Puppet 2.7 Cookbook (John Arundel, Packt Publishing)

Chef... not so much?
-- Test Driven Infrastructure with Chef (Stephen Nelson-Smith, O'Reilly Publishing)

So, to no fault of opscode, "chef" as it turns out is a difficult product name if you want differentiate yourself from the culinary folks.  Worse yet, when I searched the Kindle store for "opscode" - the Pro Puppet book was one of the 3 results (Test Driven Infrastructre and Configuration Managment - High Impact Strategies were the other 2)

"Programming Interface"
Winner: Chef
I know close to nothing about "writing code" in the real world.  I am probably rather good at shell scripting and I can throw some PHP together to do some cool stuff.
Both platforms claim you do not need to know how to "program" or need to have a lot of Ruby experience.  I declared Chef the winner because of Puppet's use of the DSL (a bit of an ironic choice words I used ;-).  Some claim that Chef's use of Ruby makes it more difficult to simply "get in there" and start using the product, as opposed to Puppet's DSL implementation of Ruby which has an easier learning curve.  Time will tell.

Current Customers
Winner: Puppet
It shouldn't be about "who you know...", but Puppet has some big names who have endorsed them.  Sun/Oracle, Rackspace, SugarCRM, Twitter -- All very huge players in the tech industry.

Employer Demand ;-)
Winner: Puppet
Let's check the job sites, shall we?

              ||  Puppet   ||   Chef
----------------------------------
Monster ||    126     ||      722
Dice       ||    298     ||     184
Well, again... the search string "Chef" returns a LOT of useless data!

Vendor Website
Winner: Puppet
Puppet has a much simpler layout/design which seems to get you more information about getting started and finding documentation.  Opscode appears to have more of a sales driven website.
http://puppetlabs.com/

http://www.opscode.com/chef/
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