On Sat, 22 May 2010, Yves Dorfsman wrote: > Has anybody done, or can point me to a *rational* comparison between those > guys, or even one including commercial products?
Here is my impressions of the three. I expect I am wrong about some of the details and invite people to correct me. cfengine is an academic project. It tend to want to control your entire system and changes are often made by writing exceptions to the current configuration. Folks I know have found the syntax to be difficult to use and have suggested that writing a code generator to create the configuration files would be an improvement in their environments. It does have a bit of the "in a perfect world" attitude. Puppet is extremely pragmatic, it lets you manage whatever pieces you want to manage. I know a number of folks who speak very highly of it. It has it's own syntax and parser that is quite straightforward. There are some operations where you need to shell out and run something that returns a result, not bad, but not spectacularly good. A reasonably mature product with lots of good support. Chef is a bit of a newcomer. It seems to have split off from some of the Puppet community, so it has the same sort of pragmatic approach to systems management. Unlike Puppet, it uses Ruby for a DSL and allows native Ruby code to be included in recipies. As a long time (even if part time) Ruby programmer, I find this to be quite appealing. Others may disagree. It is a much newer product, so it isn't as mature, but there does seem to be a good community built around it. Chef is at the top of my list to learn and implement. There are my thoughts, such as they are. -- Matt It's not what I know that counts. It's what I can remember in time to use. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lopsa.org http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
