4 ms·

Too little, too late. Surpassed by Ansible (and AWX) a long time ago. Chef was nice in 2014 to get rid of puppet...

by jandeboevrie 8y ago

empath75 8y ago
If you think people moved to ansible, that’s the wrong direction. They’re moving towards containers.
- mixedCase 8y ago
  They're certainly not mutually exclusive. You probably mean fully managed container orchestrators; and they certainly don't serve nowhere near the majority of businesses.
rad_gruchalski 8y ago
Oh, ansible, I like ansible. I even maintain this: https://github.com/radekg/terraform-provisioner-ansible https://github.com/radekg/terraform-provisioner-ansible. But chef is a completely different beast. For those who can digest ruby (as I do), chef is still a fantastic choice. I have fond memories of chef. Written countless cookbooks, recipes and bootstrapped thousands of machines with it. Having full power of ruby at one’s disposal can’t be underestimated. But one has to appreciate ruby first ;)
- h1d 8y ago
  > Having full power of ruby at one’s disposal That's when your config becomes unmaintainably large and complicated with personal taste.
  - rad_gruchalski 8y ago
    Which it often does. Our platform had 70 VMs and many operational dependencies bewteen them. Not everybody handles 5 containers per project.
wmf 8y ago
That's why Chef Inc. has been building Habitat; they can see that containers are obsoleting Chef/Puppet/Ansible.
- ksec 8y ago
  >That's why Chef Inc. has been building Habitat; Isn't that just, Docker?
  - bradknowles 8y ago
    Habitat is much more than just Docker. It's an entire CI/CD environment with containers, including orchestration of updates, the ability to do an immutable infrastructure, and so much more.
mcdermott 8y ago
Chef (and configuration management in general) is an anti-pattern for a cloud native approach. The soup of the Chef ecosystem has always seemed hard to understand (and teach new team members): Chef, Chef-solo/zero, rubocup, test kitchen, food critic, berkshelf automate, delivery druck, inspec, infa, etc... With containers and immutable infrastructure there just isn't the need anymore. They obviously realized this and created Habitat as a response, but after trying it a few times, I don't see why I'd use it over plain old Docker + K8s. If you still need configuration management, Ansible is more flexible, is easier to learn/teach (no need to learn Ruby), agentless, no need to run a sever and can also do some orchestration.
- yellowapple 8y ago
  > no need to learn Ruby Instead we'll just learn yet another ad-hoc language clumsily built atop YAML, and put up with Norway always being false when abbreviated. :)
  - tracker1 8y ago
    "no" Doesn't address the issue? Of course, I'd rather if boolean evaluation was in the markup only true and false specifically be translated
    - int_19h 8y ago
      It does, but only if you know about it in advance.
- rmoriz 8y ago
  agentless is not a feature. System changes/breaks occur. agent-based approaches are a kind of "continuous validation" of your infrastructure.

Too little, too late. Surpassed by Ansible (and AWX) a long time ago. Chef was nice in 2014 to get rid of puppet...

empath75 8y ago

If you think people moved to ansible, that’s the wrong direction. They’re moving towards containers.

mixedCase 8y ago
They're certainly not mutually exclusive. You probably mean fully managed container orchestrators; and they certainly don't serve nowhere near the majority of businesses.

rad_gruchalski 8y ago

Oh, ansible, I like ansible. I even maintain this: https://github.com/radekg/terraform-provisioner-ansible https://github.com/radekg/terraform-provisioner-ansible. But chef is a completely different beast. For those who can digest ruby (as I do), chef is still a fantastic choice. I have fond memories of chef. Written countless cookbooks, recipes and bootstrapped thousands of machines with it. Having full power of ruby at one’s disposal can’t be underestimated. But one has to appreciate ruby first ;)

h1d 8y ago
> Having full power of ruby at one’s disposal That's when your config becomes unmaintainably large and complicated with personal taste.
- rad_gruchalski 8y ago
  Which it often does. Our platform had 70 VMs and many operational dependencies bewteen them. Not everybody handles 5 containers per project.

wmf 8y ago

That's why Chef Inc. has been building Habitat; they can see that containers are obsoleting Chef/Puppet/Ansible.

ksec 8y ago
>That's why Chef Inc. has been building Habitat; Isn't that just, Docker?
- bradknowles 8y ago
  Habitat is much more than just Docker. It's an entire CI/CD environment with containers, including orchestration of updates, the ability to do an immutable infrastructure, and so much more.

mcdermott 8y ago

Chef (and configuration management in general) is an anti-pattern for a cloud native approach. The soup of the Chef ecosystem has always seemed hard to understand (and teach new team members): Chef, Chef-solo/zero, rubocup, test kitchen, food critic, berkshelf automate, delivery druck, inspec, infa, etc... With containers and immutable infrastructure there just isn't the need anymore. They obviously realized this and created Habitat as a response, but after trying it a few times, I don't see why I'd use it over plain old Docker + K8s. If you still need configuration management, Ansible is more flexible, is easier to learn/teach (no need to learn Ruby), agentless, no need to run a sever and can also do some orchestration.

yellowapple 8y ago
> no need to learn Ruby Instead we'll just learn yet another ad-hoc language clumsily built atop YAML, and put up with Norway always being false when abbreviated. :)
- tracker1 8y ago
  "no" Doesn't address the issue? Of course, I'd rather if boolean evaluation was in the markup only true and false specifically be translated
  - int_19h 8y ago
    It does, but only if you know about it in advance.
rmoriz 8y ago
agentless is not a feature. System changes/breaks occur. agent-based approaches are a kind of "continuous validation" of your infrastructure.