Skip to main content

Puppet vs Chef

I hear many people asking which is better Chef or Puppet.  Which is for developers and which is for Admins?  Then, you throw in Ansible and Salt and you get even more drama and stress.  Some companies have pockets of Chef and then, another of Puppet.  Then, someone brings in another tool and everyone is debating and struggling.   Here is my opinion and many of you are not going to like it because it will cause one vendor or team to be critical of my recommendation.

I recommend going with which ever your Ops teams like or uses.  This is the team that needs the most help in this area.  Tools like Puppet and Chef provide the most value when everyone is on the same page and want to use them.  If your Dev teams are shoving Chef down the Ops guys throats, they will never buy in.  If the Ops guys start using any tool, Devs should be able to pick them up easily.  

If you have multiple ops teams, and they are using multiple tools, that might be ok but you will never fully mature them to an enterprise level.  In this case, I recommend evaluating which one has the most mature process and the most code written.  Then, either do all new work in that tool or migrate them all to that tool.  It should be easy but will take some man hours to accomplish.  It is important to treat tools like Chef and Puppet like enterprise tools and not like  tools that can stand on their own for a team.

So you chose a tool, now what?  I will talk about this in a future post.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

2020 State of DevSecOps by Accurics

 This is an excellent report for all IT Pros and Engineers.   Highlights: Storage is most impacted solution Open security groups or network configuration Secrets are not so secret Unused resources are not secure. Take a look at these.  Look again.  These are not highly skilled problems.  They just need guidelines and proactive management.  The article uses policy as code as a solution for many of the problems.  I will drill into each of these more in the future.  I wanted to get the awareness out first and then, come back to solutions.  
Post a Comment
Read more

Learn Anti-Leadership from Basecamp

 There are many different articles out there and Twitter comments about the Basecamp drama.  I am not going to post any here because it might seem biased depending on the article.  Google them yourself.  In short, Basecamp made a policy to not allow political discussions at work.  Coinbase did this previously too and applauded Basecamp for it.   Apparently, for years there has been a list of funny customer names at floating around Basecamp.  This list or even the knowledge that Basecamp had a list, was disturbing to some employees.  Also, some employees tried to start a Diversity and Inclusion practice.  Despite how much the founders of Basecamp promoted DI, they didn't feel they were being taken serious.  They felt the company was only about the founders and not about employees.    If this isn't enough, the founders debated and even called out employees for their comments regarding the topics, publicly.  This is my s...
Post a Comment
Read more

Character and Integrity above all

 How do you lead without stress?  I am finding that many leaders are under a lot of pressure, not healthy and not sleeping well.  A good leader may have ups and downs but their trust should never be questioned.  Your day to day work will be hard and require a lot but when you know you are making decisions with high integrity and treating your employees right, you should sleep well each night.   Each day is a new day.  You should begin each day with some quiet time, exercise and make a plan.  Then, you do your best that day.  Solve problems, help your team, mentor leaders, architect or remove toil.   Above all, do everything with character and integrity because when things get hectic or when you have to move on, you know you led with trust and integrity.   People will remember the way you lead more than what you did.  If you are weak in an area, hire someone to fill that need or go learn more.  This is part of leadersh...
Post a Comment
Read more