[LRUG] Chef or Puppet

[gareth rushgrove]

Couldn't resist chiming in

On 2 August 2011 14:40, Thom May <thom at may.lt> wrote:
> In my experience the pain point is getting used to using configuration
> management, rather than the complexity of the tool itself.

Absolutely. Lots of folks come to Chef or Puppet or Cfengine with the
intend to either install something or bootstrap a new cloud instance.
And what they find are an awful lot of moving pieces. Don't skip the
documentation on the fundamentals - I know it's temping ("just show me
the code already") but you'll just frustrate yourself.

> Chef and Puppet are pretty similar in terms of operation - you have
> recipes/manifests that contain resources, which are the core unit of
> automation for both tools.

Both tools are great. Some people prefer one or the other. Their are
few compelling reasons for the majority of usecases to choose one over
the other.

> In my experience, Chef is somewhat better to approach as a programmer,
> but I've no experience of the Puppet ruby DSL (luke was pretty
> unconvinced about the need for such a thing when I stopped using
> Puppet).

I've now used both in a little bit of anger. Chef used to have a
steeper learning curve but the documentation has got much better
recently. Chef is also newer, which used to mean fewer folks to talk
to about what worked and what didn't - again now lots of people using
both.

I personally really like the Puppet DSL, once you start thinking about
it as mapping a dependency graph out. But you can just use Ruby if you
prefer. If this bugs you choose Chef.

Chef can be used without the server, so can Puppet. The puppetmaster
daemon is simpler than the full chef server install, but does less.
You'll probably add some of mcollective, puppet-dashboard or forman
for most puppet installs.

Whichever you choose, learn how to make deb/rpm packages for your
chosen distro. Having chef/puppet doing lots of exec types and
compiling software is slow and makes for not particularly clean
recipes/manifests.

And take a look at a decent sized example as well as the short
tutorials. Here's the puppet repo from the Debian folks:

http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=mirror/dsa-puppet.git;a=tree;f=modules;h=59ca829f0118bf35a1b3fc08e8d98761ffadf341;hb=HEAD

And here's a similar size Chef repo:

http://code.hep.wisc.edu/chef/

There are a few things personally I'd do differently to those but you
get a pretty good idea of what a project looks like.

Whichever you choose, set aside time to learn the tool. And for the
first thing you automate make it something you know how to do manually
backwards.

Gareth


> Aren't there both Puppet and Chef talks next week anyway?
> Cheers,
> -Thom
>
> On Tue, Aug 2, 2011 at 14:32, Riccardo Tacconi <rtacconi at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I remember I attended the Chef and Puppet talk last year (or may be it was
>> 2009). However I do not have a clear picture of which I should choose. I
>> have been using Chef from yesterday but I find it complex and although the
>> site has many documents, I find myself lost. I saw that Puppet have a new
>> book written by on the the Lruggers, so I could buy that book and start from
>> one point and move forward.
>>
>> --
>> Riccardo Tacconi
>> Ruby on Rails and PHP development - System Administration
>> VIRTUELOGIC LIMITED
>>
>> http://github.com/rtacconi
>> http://riccardotacconi.blogspot.com
>> http://twitter.com/rtacconi
>> http://www.linkedin.com/in/riccardotacconi
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Chat mailing list
>> Chat at lists.lrug.org
>> http://lists.lrug.org/listinfo.cgi/chat-lrug.org
>>
>>
> _______________________________________________
> Chat mailing list
> Chat at lists.lrug.org
> http://lists.lrug.org/listinfo.cgi/chat-lrug.org
>



-- 
Gareth Rushgrove
Web Geek

morethanseven.net
garethrushgrove.com