[chef] Re: Re: Re: Ruby, Chef, Omnibus and you!

[Brad Knowles < >]

On Dec 30, 2011, at 8:40 PM, Alex Howells wrote:

> Whilst I appreciate you will never cater to all needs, and there is a
> core of 'power user' out there who will always do their own thing, the
> recommended route for deploying chef-client (which seems to be heading
> in an Omnibus direction) needs to cater for the masses, and that
> *does* mean things like SELinux (amongst other things) will become
> increasingly important to support properly.

I'm not convinced that SELinux is something that the "masses" deal with 
today, or that it is something they will be dealing with in the near future.

IMO, Chef has a long ways to go with regards to better supporting other OS 
platforms, even just other versions of Linux that are commonly used in the 
business community (e.g., RHEL/CentOS).  Ideally, we would have both better 
support for other platforms AND support for SELinux, but in reality we have 
to face the facts that there will always be limits to the available resources.

Of course, the core code supports multiple platforms fine, but one of the 
biggest advantages that you're getting with Chef is the community cookbooks, 
and that's also their Achilles Heel with regards to support for platforms 
other than Ubuntu.  That said, this kind of thing is entirely expected when 
you're talking about such a young product from such a young company, 
especially one that has such strong ties to the open source community.  Given 
time, this problem would tend to largely resolve itself as the company grows, 
the customer list grows, and the community grows.


My biggest concern is the risk that we might all get put on the back burner 
so that they can focus on Windows.  That's the biggest potential market with 
the biggest potential ROI, and I think it would be the most attractive to 
bean counters.

However, I also think it is also a huge risk that Microsoft might wipe them 
out with a single stroke -- or worse, buy them up and then kill support for 
all non-Microsoft OSes.

-- 
Brad Knowles 
<
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SAGE Level IV, Chef Level 0.0.1