

Puppet vs. Chef vs. Ansible vs. Salt - cies
http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=D21968B0-EE1C-1249-85D672B34C0DA5BB

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WestCoastJustin
For anyone looking into Puppet, I have created a screencast, on how to Learn
Puppet using Vagrant @ [http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/8-learning-puppet-
with-vag...](http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/8-learning-puppet-with-vagrant)

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mpdehaan2
disclaimer: Ansible creator here and I am a co-founder of AnsibleWorks.

FWIW, Infoworld didn't allow my comment on the article to be approved. I
appreciate the review, but also think reducing these things down to scores is
probably not the best approach, and the review was skimmed over in several
places, most noticeably the end piece where it would list an advantage of one
tool that was in two or three. Also, mixing in the commercial components is
really more about comparing _companies_ , which makes it confusing.

Here's what I posted:

Ultimately I think configuration systems are a bit like your favorite type of
food -- and folks need to try everything to find their favorite (with a node
to OpsCode) cuisine. I think that's more important than saying someone should
try one or the other -- get what's going to make you productive.

To us, Puppet is a large improvement over CFEngine as a configuration
management tool, and Chef contains some stylistic variations on Puppet that
may make it better for many audiences (especially Ruby developers). Choose
what fits your thought patterns. SaltStack is a Python implementation of the
Puppet with a bit of a "different" security architecture -- to each his own.

Picking something that is secure and reliable, and that you get along with the
language -- to us -- is maximally important.

Ansible's goal is a little bit different from the others -- be a general
purpose workflow system, focused on apps. OS, apps, zero downtime rolling
updates, should be maximally readable, infrastructure management should be a
minimum of hassle, and it should be maximally secure. It can configure, but
the reason you want to configure an OS is to roll out apps. And it can scale
to many thousand nodes from a single box. (Alas, too much FUD about the SSH
thing -- people should try accelerated mode too!). Most importantly, we
believe the infrastructure that manages your infrastructure should not be
something you have to manage.

So, that's what I tried to post. Anyway, I encourage everybody to experiment.
I tend to think we appeal more to developers than sysadmins -- because we
focus on apps, so some of the generalizations in the article I find weird, but
it's also interesting to see people's takes on things.

It's always good to have attention from folks so people can find out about
things -- but I think Hacker News folks should dig down beyond the
generalizations, find an hour to play with everything (each), and try them in
your own environment.

Likely one tool is going to resonate more -- and, I think most of us in
different companies would agree -- we're fine if you think that tool is not
ours, but we want it to be for the right reasons -- meaning you personally
tried it :)

People coming in from a new users perspective may also be interested in Matt
Jaynes's book here:

[http://devopsu.com/books/taste-test-puppet-chef-salt-
stack-a...](http://devopsu.com/books/taste-test-puppet-chef-salt-stack-
ansible.html)

