[chef] Re: System configuration tool comparison

[Jean-Baptiste Barth < >]

Hi,

2010/8/13 Bart Vanbrabant < "> >

Since Chef is a well known tool within the system administration
community, we included it in our comparison. We also set up a website
that accompanies the paper. On this website, you will find the full
evaluation of Chef at http://sysconfigtools.cer-wiki.info/tool/chef
My question to you: if you want to help us making this website and our
paper better, please review Chef (or other tools you are familiar
with) and provide us with comments, either by email or using the
comment-facility on the website.

Sounds very interesting ! Do you have a precise grid to evaluate subjective criterias ? There are a couple of things I would answer by a "it depends on how you implement it" or just "it depends". How will you address this kind of question ?

The main one is a common troll about Chef : for the moment you evaluate the "Ease of use" to "hard" because it's a ruby DSL. But in the real world, the lambda sysadmin don't even know he is writing ruby. In most cases, the syntax is much much more simple than Cfengine for instance.

It has been an argument among others to choose puppet over chef in my organization. But no one seem to understand that tools with a so-called "specialized configuration syntax" always end up in re-inventing the wheel (see on puppet MLs the endless discussions about how variables are scoped, about if/then/else syntax, etc). Anyway it's just an example, it's not totally true with Puppet 2.6, which now has a real builtin ruby DSL to write recipes.

I don't want to start a new troll at all, I'd rather like to understand how people address those questions and compare things. In my opinion, the only good answer to such questions is either "it depends on your needs and situation", or much more factual metrics, but there would be a lot to take into account, with little chance we have clearer ideas at the end.

Does anybody here has a solid "sales argument" for that ?

Cheers

-- 

Jean-Baptiste