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I disagree that it's "long dead". Keep in mind that Chef (the company) has several different products too...Chef Infra (traditional configuration management) h

I disagree that it's "long dead". Keep in mind that Chef (the company) has several different products too...Chef Infra (traditional configuration management) has fallen out of favor and Ansible seems to be the popular choice these days, but there are still a lot of big Chef Infra shops (e.g. Facebook [0]) that have invested heavily into configuring their environments using Chef Infra, which would require a good bit of investment to switch tools. Plus, they have been diversifying their products in recent years with things like Habitat (application packaging/deployment) and security/compliance tools (InSpec). [0] http://www.chef.io/customers http://www.chef.io/customers

geerlingguy 6y ago
The fact that I've never heard of Habitat or InSpec means either they're extremely niche and not as popular as I think Chef would've hoped, or I'm completely out of touch with both app packaging and sec tooling. I'm hoping it's the former, but I wouldn't be too surprised if the latter since the 'enterprise' ecosystem of cloud tooling has grown exponentially in the past decade.
- carlosf 6y ago
  You're not out of touch, Terraform + Containers + People realizing that building immutable things is much better than managing state pretty much killed Chef and Puppet.
  - user5994461 6y ago
    People still have to manage quite a bit of setup for kubernetes/containers though... and that configuration usually happens with ansible, not chef. I think it's fair to say that Chef has failed to hold their market.
    - miah_ 6y ago
      Consider that Chef Infra has 2 core developers and its not surprising why.
  - notyourday 6y ago
    People love talking about their state being immutable when in 99.9% of the cases it is not. Here's a simple test: if your runtime container infrastructure is immutable, you should be able to run your container with a file system being read-only. If you cannot do that, then you do not have an immutable infrastructure and hence you will need need something to manage the state. Ignoring it is akin to kicking housekeeping tasks to some point in future and hoping that before you get buried under the multi-year backlog of tiny corner cases before your entire product is replaced with something else.
  - devonkim 6y ago
    After having spent the past decade across about 12+ companies in various capacities furiously trying to make software immutable and to isolate state to dedicated services like DBs, message brokers, and networked caches, I’m not sure if it’ll go away without many companies rewriting software from the ground up effectively to support cloud native-ish assumptions like 12F but much more like avoiding leaving transactional state on-disk that can’t be recovered. There’s a TON of software out there that is written like it’s the 90s still. The market for managing legacy stateful software is matured to its finality and nobody wants to try to attempt to revolutionize it anymore is what I’m seeing, not that nobody is doing it anymore. Essentially, if one is writing new software that isn’t containerized in 2020 you’re writing the systems equivalent of COBOL. But anyone could see many years ago that it’s easier to flatten and reinstall stuff than trying to painstakingly manage various moving pieces. We were limited by our technology unless one was using stuff like zones in BSD or Solaris. The surprise for me has been how rapidly huge behemoth organizations like the DoD has shifted to technologies like K8S when they took so many years just to get onto VMware and some configuration management.
- nunez 6y ago
  Holy shit; if /u/geerlingguy hasn’t heard of Hab or InSpec, then Chef really could’ve done a better job marketing them. (This user is very well known in the config management space.)
- chucky_z 6y ago
  InSpec is really a good tool you should know. I believe you can write molecule tests with it so it’s something you may have already used at this point and not realized it.

geerlingguy 6y ago

The fact that I've never heard of Habitat or InSpec means either they're extremely niche and not as popular as I think Chef would've hoped, or I'm completely out of touch with both app packaging and sec tooling. I'm hoping it's the former, but I wouldn't be too surprised if the latter since the 'enterprise' ecosystem of cloud tooling has grown exponentially in the past decade.

carlosf 6y ago
You're not out of touch, Terraform + Containers + People realizing that building immutable things is much better than managing state pretty much killed Chef and Puppet.
- user5994461 6y ago
  People still have to manage quite a bit of setup for kubernetes/containers though... and that configuration usually happens with ansible, not chef. I think it's fair to say that Chef has failed to hold their market.
  - miah_ 6y ago
    Consider that Chef Infra has 2 core developers and its not surprising why.
- notyourday 6y ago
  People love talking about their state being immutable when in 99.9% of the cases it is not. Here's a simple test: if your runtime container infrastructure is immutable, you should be able to run your container with a file system being read-only. If you cannot do that, then you do not have an immutable infrastructure and hence you will need need something to manage the state. Ignoring it is akin to kicking housekeeping tasks to some point in future and hoping that before you get buried under the multi-year backlog of tiny corner cases before your entire product is replaced with something else.
- devonkim 6y ago
  After having spent the past decade across about 12+ companies in various capacities furiously trying to make software immutable and to isolate state to dedicated services like DBs, message brokers, and networked caches, I’m not sure if it’ll go away without many companies rewriting software from the ground up effectively to support cloud native-ish assumptions like 12F but much more like avoiding leaving transactional state on-disk that can’t be recovered. There’s a TON of software out there that is written like it’s the 90s still. The market for managing legacy stateful software is matured to its finality and nobody wants to try to attempt to revolutionize it anymore is what I’m seeing, not that nobody is doing it anymore. Essentially, if one is writing new software that isn’t containerized in 2020 you’re writing the systems equivalent of COBOL. But anyone could see many years ago that it’s easier to flatten and reinstall stuff than trying to painstakingly manage various moving pieces. We were limited by our technology unless one was using stuff like zones in BSD or Solaris. The surprise for me has been how rapidly huge behemoth organizations like the DoD has shifted to technologies like K8S when they took so many years just to get onto VMware and some configuration management.
nunez 6y ago
Holy shit; if /u/geerlingguy hasn’t heard of Hab or InSpec, then Chef really could’ve done a better job marketing them. (This user is very well known in the config management space.)
chucky_z 6y ago
InSpec is really a good tool you should know. I believe you can write molecule tests with it so it’s something you may have already used at this point and not realized it.