[SGVLUG] chef vs puppet

[Christopher Smith]

On Sun, Apr 29, 2012 at 6:10 PM, Michael Proctor-Smith
<mproctor13 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I see the major differences between chef and puppet is that puppet mostly
> forces you to use puppet dsl while chef let you use normal ruby. Also much
> more work is done on the puppet master then on the chef server. Meaning you
> need to scale you puppet masters.
>
> That being said my experance is with chef.

My experience with scaling Puppet was mostly that the web server
itself needed some help with scaling (WEBrick is not exactly
scalable). Once you lick that, the load is pretty light.

The embedded vs. external DSL debate tends to be a big part of the
discussion, perhaps overly so. I think though that Chris Siebenmann
really nailed why an external DSL is the better way to go for
configuration management:
http://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/programming/ConfiguringInRealLanguage

Even though the system I'm working on right now is small enough that I
don't need a DSL at all to manage configuration (Salt is valuable for
me as much for monitoring & operational support as it is for
configuration management), I'm already starting to feel the tug for
one. Even if you were going to embed a DSL inside your language, you'd
want to choose a declarative language rather than an imperative one
like Ruby.

-- 
Chris