

Yet Another Puppet vs. Chef vs. Ansible vs. Salt Topic - emirozer
http://www.emir.works/configuration-management-battlefield/

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cachedout
Salt dev here. :]

Salt does not force you into YAML/Jinja2. It has a pluggable rendering system
that includes out-of-the-box support for thin DSLs, like PyDSL and PyObjects.
It's also straightforward to add additional renderers if you like:\

[https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/ref/renderers/index.htm...](https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/ref/renderers/index.html)

~~~
antod
I came here to say the same thing.

That's one thing I really like about Salt is the way everything is really just
an easily accessible Python dictionary in the end. It's really very
customisable, and does a good job of balancing simplicity vs power for our
uses.

I haven't used Ansible a whole lot, but it also seems really good too. It
seems positioned a bit closer to the simplicity end of that continuum though
that suits a lot of people.

------
honest_joe
"(I also want to note that for your sake, if you cannot read/write ruby at the
level of writing a cookbook than you should really question yourself as an
administrator.)"

Ruby is quite complex language. I would say more complex than Python and
should not be considered standard. When you use Chef/Puppet it is obviously
required but absolutely unnecessary when you have a different setup.

Or perhaps you should not call yourself and administrator if you do not know
all the traits of UNIX OS-es.

CFengine "lost" the battle even when it's the fastest one with the smallest
performance footprint.

~~~
lotsofcows
I'm 41. I've never used Ruby. What have I been doing for the last 20 years?

~~~
jkmcf
But you probably could write ruby well enough to author a cookbook, assuming
you wanted to invest vast amounts time/sanity in learning chef.

