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Two reasons I'm wary of Chef wrt Puppet 1) the declarative vs imperative aspect 2) Chef's heavy dependencies As a Ruby developer, I like Chef's Ruby DSL; but

by nona 15y ago

Two reasons I'm wary of Chef wrt Puppet 1) the declarative vs imperative aspect 2) Chef's heavy dependencies As a Ruby developer, I like Chef's Ruby DSL; but I somehow feel that its imperative DSL will lead to something similar to Bash Hell. I'd like to read more about the declarative properties of Puppet vs the imperative way of Chef, and why one should prefer one over the other. Secondly, like some commenters before mention, Chef's dependencies seem quite excessive.

parasubvert 15y ago
Chef is becoming more declarative as it grows. The main difference with Chef is that it has imperative structure (i.e. ruby-based scripting) to fall back on, whereas Puppet forces you to go out to a script if you want to be imperative. In the long run, it's arguable that a strict declarative structure has more interesting properties when dealing with query of status & handling changes or drifts rather than "stamping out a server". Puppet has been great for me to detect and correct drift, for example, all the while ensuring pre-requisites are executed in the proper order. The tradeoff is that you have to think through the various dependencies at a detailed level, which can be difficult. An extreme analogy would be programming with a logic language vs. an imperative language. My experience has been Puppet is growing in popularity with enterprises, not just web companies, and it seems Puppet Labs is targeting this audience more than Opscode is, comparing customer lists. I'm not quite sure why this is - could be attitude - Chef is more about "get it done now", Puppet more about "get it right for the long haul", but even that is a caricature.
- lkanies 15y ago
  (disclaimer - founder of Puppet) We at Puppet Labs have always focused on building tools that anyone can use, not just the best hackers in the world. We've got some of the best sysadmins working with us, but we punish them by making them write software that even people who aren't the best sysadmins can use. So yeah, we get a ton of enterprise adoption as a result, but we've also got a ton of web companies using Puppet. It's true that in the Rails web startup, we're not always the number 1 choice, though. :)

by nona 15y ago

parasubvert 15y ago

Chef is becoming more declarative as it grows. The main difference with Chef is that it has imperative structure (i.e. ruby-based scripting) to fall back on, whereas Puppet forces you to go out to a script if you want to be imperative. In the long run, it's arguable that a strict declarative structure has more interesting properties when dealing with query of status & handling changes or drifts rather than "stamping out a server". Puppet has been great for me to detect and correct drift, for example, all the while ensuring pre-requisites are executed in the proper order. The tradeoff is that you have to think through the various dependencies at a detailed level, which can be difficult. An extreme analogy would be programming with a logic language vs. an imperative language. My experience has been Puppet is growing in popularity with enterprises, not just web companies, and it seems Puppet Labs is targeting this audience more than Opscode is, comparing customer lists. I'm not quite sure why this is - could be attitude - Chef is more about "get it done now", Puppet more about "get it right for the long haul", but even that is a caricature.

lkanies 15y ago
(disclaimer - founder of Puppet) We at Puppet Labs have always focused on building tools that anyone can use, not just the best hackers in the world. We've got some of the best sysadmins working with us, but we punish them by making them write software that even people who aren't the best sysadmins can use. So yeah, we get a ton of enterprise adoption as a result, but we've also got a ton of web companies using Puppet. It's true that in the Rails web startup, we're not always the number 1 choice, though. :)