Chef and puppet - quick question

Chef Infra (archive)
1

Hi

We’re new to chef.
Chef and Puppet - are they competing products for sysadmin config
management and installations management ?

thanks

2

Yes. Chef and Puppet are similar products, and if you are looking for very
basic configuration management, both can provide similar functionality.

If you want to get started with configuration management/automation and
have not decided which one to chose, I definitely recommend you to use
chef. I personally started with Puppet, then moved to Chef, and have been
a happy customer ever since. Chef could do almost everything that Puppet
could, and has additional features which are really useful, comes with a
nice command line client, offers you a lot of flexibility etc. If you are
looking for a specific use case, we would like to hear about it from you so
that we could help you making a wise decision.

Thanks
Gourav

On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 9:09 AM, Z W mpc8250@gmail.com wrote:

Hi

We're new to chef.
Chef and Puppet - are they competing products for sysadmin config
management and installations management ?

thanks

3

Hi Gourav

Thanks for responding.
We have a build environment with about 20 nodes, with each doing
different roles.
We want to bring our CI process to a higher level to include
automating application installations and sanity testing on a few nodes
in our infrastructure.
We heard that Chef has a big learning curve and we don't have much
time to learn at leisure.
We like to experiment if we could provide some private cloud service
characteristics of our build environment using chef.

Any tips ?

Thanks

On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 7:55 PM, Gourav Shah gs@initcron.org wrote:

Yes. Chef and Puppet are similar products, and if you are looking for very
basic configuration management, both can provide similar functionality.

If you want to get started with configuration management/automation and have
not decided which one to chose, I definitely recommend you to use chef. I
personally started with Puppet, then moved to Chef, and have been a happy
customer ever since. Chef could do almost everything that Puppet could, and
has additional features which are really useful, comes with a nice command
line client, offers you a lot of flexibility etc. If you are looking for a
specific use case, we would like to hear about it from you so that we could
help you making a wise decision.

Thanks
Gourav

On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 9:09 AM, Z W mpc8250@gmail.com wrote:

Hi

We're new to chef.
Chef and Puppet - are they competing products for sysadmin config
management and installations management ?

thanks

4

can elaborate on "private cloud service characteristics"?
If you have openstack or some other IaaS solution in place, you can hook
their api's with chef(knife to be precise) to spawn instances. Chef
provides search functionality which you can exploit to reconfigure other
instances when you spawn up /down instances. Chef/knife already have
openstack, aws etc integration in place, so you might be able to reuse some
of these components.
This mailing list, chef irc channel and wiki can help you through this,
best
ranjib

On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 8:56 PM, Z W mpc8250@gmail.com wrote:

Hi Gourav

Thanks for responding.
We have a build environment with about 20 nodes, with each doing
different roles.
We want to bring our CI process to a higher level to include
automating application installations and sanity testing on a few nodes
in our infrastructure.
We heard that Chef has a big learning curve and we don't have much
time to learn at leisure.
We like to experiment if we could provide some private cloud service
characteristics of our build environment using chef.

Any tips ?

Thanks

On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 7:55 PM, Gourav Shah gs@initcron.org wrote:

Yes. Chef and Puppet are similar products, and if you are looking for
very
basic configuration management, both can provide similar functionality.

If you want to get started with configuration management/automation and
have
not decided which one to chose, I definitely recommend you to use chef.
I
personally started with Puppet, then moved to Chef, and have been a happy
customer ever since. Chef could do almost everything that Puppet could,
and
has additional features which are really useful, comes with a nice
command
line client, offers you a lot of flexibility etc. If you are looking
for a
specific use case, we would like to hear about it from you so that we
could
help you making a wise decision.

Thanks
Gourav

On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 9:09 AM, Z W mpc8250@gmail.com wrote:

Hi

We're new to chef.
Chef and Puppet - are they competing products for sysadmin config
management and installations management ?

thanks