Skip to main content

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/

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

PXE boot a LiveCD image

Summary: I have wanted to build a kickstart environment which hosted a "rescue CD" or LiveCD to allow you to boot over the network after you blew your stuff up and needed to repair a few things.  Today I have worked through a method of doing so, with the help of the people who published a succinct script with the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor.  (the script will be at the bottom of this post - if I have somehow not followed the GPL, please let me know and I will correct whatever is necessary) NOTE/Warning: The boot will fail due the initrd being too large (645mb).  I'm not sure how to proceed.  This procedure worked for RHEVh, because it is quite a bit smaller.  Hopefully I can report back with progress on this? :-$ Procedure: download your LiveCD image to /export/isos/RESCUE/Fedora-16-i686-Live-Desktop.iso # cd /var/tmp # vi livecd-iso-to-pxeboot (populate the file with the script shown below) # chmod 754 ./livecd-iso-to-pxeb...

"Error getting authority: Error initializing authority: Could not connect: No such file or directory (g-io-error-quark, 1)"

"Error getting authority: Error initializing authority: Could not connect: No such file or directory (g-io-error-quark, 1)" One issue that may cause this to arise is if you managed to break your /etc/fstab We had an engineer add a line with the intended options of "nfsvers=3" but instead added "-onfsvers=3" and it broke the system fairly catastrophically.

MOTD with colors! (also applies to shell profiles)

I'm not sure why I had never looked into this before, but this evening I became obsessed with discovering how to present different colored text in the /etc/motd. A person had suggested creating a shell script (rather than using special editing modes in vi, or something) and I agree that is the simplest way of getting this accomplished quickly. This most noteworthy portion of this script is the following: RESET="\033[0m" that puts the users shell back to the original color. I typically like a green text on black background. Also - a great reference for the different colors and font-type (underscore, etc...) https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Color_Bash_Prompt I found this example on the web and I wish I could recall where so that I could provide credit to that person. #!/bin/bash #define the filename to use as output motd="/etc/motd" # Collect useful information about your system # $USER is automatically defined HOSTNAME=`uname -n` KERNEL=`un...