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Chef/Puppet have a much higher learning curve and typically require you to set up a master. You can do things masterless but most of the docs I've read assume y

Chef/Puppet have a much higher learning curve and typically require you to set up a master. You can do things masterless but most of the docs I've read assume you have a master set up. Chef's documentation is incredibly awful and the only way to learn it seems to be by suffering through it. I would recommend Puppet over Chef but Ansible is just easier. If you have the time to learn Chef/Puppet then I guess go for it and you may find things you like more but if you're trying to get stuff done and want new folks to also be able to come up to speed fast then use Ansible. The only problem with Ansible is that it is less mature so sometimes there may be features it doesn't support but the project is moving at an incredible pace and it is very extensible.

rektide 13y ago
The amount of time I spent in Puppet writing modules to install things to a master was ridiculous. I could have not automated and done it manually, but I preferred bootstrapping Puppet with Puppet. And that time you spend setting up a master? It's hopefully limited. But the joy doesn't end. Once your master is set up, then you get to install Puppet on every client too, and configure the client to point to your puppetmaster. Ansible is really a data (or as they say, model) driven massively parallel shell scripting system with advanced templating, tailored for configuration management. It does a lot more, and it's design footprint is at the same time far less. ++
- JustinGarrison 13y ago
  I was running into the same problem. So I wrote a playbook that deploys puppet agent using Ansible. https://github.com/rothgar/ansible-playbooks/tree/master/playbooks/puppet https://github.com/rothgar/ansible-playbooks/tree/master/pla... After writing that, and a few other playbooks, I really like Ansible and could see eventually replacing Puppet or at least using both in my environment.

rektide 13y ago

The amount of time I spent in Puppet writing modules to install things to a master was ridiculous. I could have not automated and done it manually, but I preferred bootstrapping Puppet with Puppet. And that time you spend setting up a master? It's hopefully limited. But the joy doesn't end. Once your master is set up, then you get to install Puppet on every client too, and configure the client to point to your puppetmaster. Ansible is really a data (or as they say, model) driven massively parallel shell scripting system with advanced templating, tailored for configuration management. It does a lot more, and it's design footprint is at the same time far less. ++

JustinGarrison 13y ago
I was running into the same problem. So I wrote a playbook that deploys puppet agent using Ansible. https://github.com/rothgar/ansible-playbooks/tree/master/playbooks/puppet https://github.com/rothgar/ansible-playbooks/tree/master/pla... After writing that, and a few other playbooks, I really like Ansible and could see eventually replacing Puppet or at least using both in my environment.