CFEngine vs Puppet vs Chef popularity in New Zealand

Forums › IT Pro and developers › CFEngine vs Puppet vs Chef popularity in New Zealand

vanzale

2 posts

Wannabe Geek

#103184 1-Jun-2012 09:09

Hi there

We're trying to decide on a configuration management tool and the fight is between CFEngine3, Puppet, and Chef. They all have their pros and cons and although I've used Puppet before I'm trying to keep an open mind.

For me an important thing is that whatever we decide on is used elsewhere in NZ so that (a) there's a better chance that new employees joining us will have prior experience and (b) people leaving have a valuable skill on their CV.

Does anybody know (maybe from recent job-hunting experience) the relative popularity of these tools?

magu

Professional yak shaver
1599 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

BitSignal

Lifetime subscriber

#633892 1-Jun-2012 09:14

Welcome to Geekzone!

I have personally looked at Puppet and Chef, and found Chef more intuitive due to its use of Ruby for the programming.

"Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads." - Doc Emmet Brown

openmedia

3325 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#634010 1-Jun-2012 11:28

Personally I've used CFEngine and puppet, plus I've looked at Chef

Out of the three I've used puppet the most.

Generally known online as OpenMedia, now working for Red Hat APAC as a Technology Evangelist and Portfolio Architect. Still playing with MythTV and digital media on the side.

Noodles

487 posts

Ultimate Geek

#634073 1-Jun-2012 12:26

We use puppet, but will probably end up moving to chef as puppet seems quite slow for what we're using it for.

nigelj

856 posts

Ultimate Geek

#634325 1-Jun-2012 18:50

Puppet and CFEngine certainly have the "I've heard of that before" factor these days, I think Chef is getting there too, there are other tools out there as well.

Puppet seems to be where the most activity is these days, personally I'm not overly keen on it though (having used it in a production environment a while back) I believe some things have got better (originally you had to have the _exact_ same build of puppet and puppetmaster everywhere) and some I believe worse (as I recall they override some of the standard Ruby libraries in some unusual ways).

Facter and the templating though are things that I did really like in puppet though, this is really something that is a case of , you won't know which you like until you've actually used it.

nickanderson

3 posts

Wannabe Geek

#634481 2-Jun-2012 03:12

Noodles: We use puppet, but will probably end up moving to chef as puppet seems quite slow for what we're using it for.

CFEngine runs at a 5 minute interval by default. Resource usage is significantly lower for CFEngine over at least puppet in my experience. ( have never tried Chef ).

magu

Professional yak shaver
1599 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

BitSignal

Lifetime subscriber

#634508 2-Jun-2012 09:04

nickanderson:
Noodles: We use puppet, but will probably end up moving to chef as puppet seems quite slow for what we're using it for.

CFEngine runs at a 5 minute interval by default. Resource usage is significantly lower for CFEngine over at least puppet in my experience. ( have never tried Chef ).

Chef is configurable. I have the clients running at 30 minute intervals.

"Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads." - Doc Emmet Brown

nickanderson

3 posts

Wannabe Geek

#634515 2-Jun-2012 09:22

magu:
Chef is configurable. I have the clients running at 30 minute intervals.

Sure you can configure them all to run at different intervals, my point was just about the resource usage of CFEngine compared to alternatives. And they are all good tools. I started with Puppet and while I decided to move to CFEngine 3 for various reasons I still think Puppet is an awesome tool.

Of course everything "depends" but with CFEngine your going to start with a much smaller footprint (requirements/dependancies, memory, cpu).

http://blog.normation.com/2011/02/23/why-we-use-cfengine-memory-footprint/
http://cfengine.com/blog/scale-and-scalability

Wise

Send money globally for less with Wise - one free transfer up to NZ$900 (affiliate link).

ptinson

677 posts

Ultimate Geek

Trusted

#634584 2-Jun-2012 13:04

I have used cengine2, cfengine3, puppet and chef now.
cfengine3 used to be a major mental exercise to understand and use but as stated it has a much lower dependency lists, resource requirement and its widely used.

puppet seemed good until you got to a point where you had complex setups and needed to make any kind of major change, it also was quite slow in the end.

Chef seems good so far, but we only have a small install so far, the use of ruby can be good and bad, its easy enough to read but because its ruby you can end up having a dependency nightmare with a reasonable install of ruby on all machines.
Because its another language you also tend to get the religious debate about which language is better, the Java developers seem to be the most zealous.

In all if cfengine weren't such a mind job from newbie POV it is one of the best tools around.

meat popsicle

vanzale

2 posts

Wannabe Geek

#635808 5-Jun-2012 08:51

Thanks for the replies. So it seems like all 3 are used to some extent. Unfortunately no clear winner . Puppet does make more of an appearance than the others (and I know of a few companies using it) but sometimes it's mentioned along with "we wish we were using something else" :)

Personally I'm inclined to go for Puppet purely for the fact that it's well known, the syntax is quite newbie-friendly, and you can really accomplish anything with it given enough hacking around. It's not too hard for a new sys admin to come to grips with and start using. I agree with ptinson's sentiment that it can be troublesome with a complex setup and it can be slow to run though.

Chef looks interesting but the heavy dependency list puts me off, especially since we have some older systems we'd like to manage (may have trouble with Puppet on these). For me it's not different enough to the other two to warrant the install.

I like the look of CFEngine3 especially the fact that it is small and highly portable, but the syntax puts me off a bit. I could probably get to grips with it but I don't want to give the other guys here any reason not to get started. For the people that use it are there any killer features that you wouldn't want to drop it for?

nickanderson

3 posts

Wannabe Geek

#635824 5-Jun-2012 09:14

vanzale:
I like the look of CFEngine3 especially the fact that it is small and highly portable, but the syntax puts me off a bit. I could probably get to grips with it but I don't want to give the other guys here any reason not to get started. For the people that use it are there any killer features that you wouldn't want to drop it for?

I wouldn't want to give up the small footprint and speed. I also was put off by the syntax when I started with CFEngine3. The best I can say is, it does grow on you. CFEngine was already really fast, but 3.3.x is a huge improvement in speed.

On one cluster I have policy runs went from ~ 1 minute to < 10 sec.

I was watching some talk the other day and there was a great line "Big boys and girls learn their tools". If you have a team and a mandate to choose a tool evaluate them all. And give them all a good solid shot. Weigh the pros and cons of each tool and figure out what fits best for you.

Oh and they recently announced CFEngine 3 Enterprise which is a consolidation of the pay versions into just Enterprise and now you can use the enterprise version free for up to 25 nodes.

zzamboni

3 posts

Wannabe Geek

#636390 5-Jun-2012 22:03

I like the look of CFEngine3 especially the fact that it is small and highly portable, but the syntax puts me off a bit. I could probably get to grips with it but I don't want to give the other guys here any reason not to get started. For the people that use it are there any killer features that you wouldn't want to drop it for?

Apart from what Nick has said, we just announced the CFEngine Design Center, which allows sharing and reusing CFEngine components ("sketches"), so you can get started much more easily with common tasks, without having to learn the language up front. There's still only a few sketches available, but it's growing every day: https://cfengine.com/cfengine-design-center. The repo itself is hosted on GitHub: https://github.com/cfengine/design-center

(disclaimer: I work at CFEngine AS)

--Diego