[chef-dev] Re: Dialect support and loading enhancements

[Brad Knowles < >]

On Sep 19, 2013, at 3:57 PM, Joseph Holsten 
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 wrote:

>> If anyone has any feedback please don't hesitate to shoot me an email or 
>> comment on the pull request/ticket.
> 
> So much <3.

Same here!

> For those interested in how alternate formats can work well, here's the doc 
> for saltstack's pydsl (closest to chef dsl today):
>    http://docs.saltstack.com/ref/renderers/all/salt.renderers.pydsl.html
> compared to their jinja + yaml format (similar to mustache + yaml from the 
> proposal):
>    http://docs.saltstack.com/ref/renderers/all/salt.renderers.jinja.html

I've been looking at saltstack, as well as ansible, and I'm really starting 
to like jinja2+yaml.  As another point of comparison, here's the main ansible 
page for their playbooks: <http://ansibleworks.com/docs/playbooks.html>.

> I'm not sure we could ever write libraries or lwrps in non-ruby, but I 
> definitely support it in recipes, attributes, metadata & templates.

That, plus collapsing unnecessary directories -- I see so much winnage.


In comparison to Puppet, I like that Chef has such a complete REST API that 
is so easy for our programmers to learn.  In comparison to ansible, I like 
the fact that the REST API with Chef comes out-of-the-box, instead of 
requiring that you download their commercial AWX tool (even if it is free for 
managing up to ten hosts).

As we know, tools like Omnibus make it so much easier to manage the tools 
you're using to manage the rest of the infrastructure, and that lesson seems 
to be sorely lacking with regards to the other systems I've been looking at 
lately.

Oh, and then there is support for a wide variety of platforms.


If we can simplify Chef enough to make it easier for non-programmers to 
learn, but still maintain the underlying power, I think the company and the 
community will be in an excellent position.

--
Brad Knowles 
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LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>