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Comment by sammcd | Hacker News Reader

If anyone here could discuss the pros and cons of this compared to chef for server configuration i would be very interested.

I often spend way more time than i expect to when configuring a new server, and have recently been very interested in ways to speed that up.

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Initially, it won't speed you up. Developing the right provisioning formula requires some investment of time but I think it's time you get back many times over because you don't need to follow a bunch of manual steps and making changes to the infrastructure is easier when it's all code. I prefer chef simply because it's easy to develop customizations; the DSL is just ruby. I have a pretty non-standard application stack but automating the provisioning is pretty straight forward. I can bring up the whole thing from bare machine images in minutes. Check out http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Launch+Cloud+Instances+...

I don't know if there's a puppet equivalent to chef-solo but using it with vagrant and VirtualBox is my favorite way to develop chef recipes. I did short presentation about this a few months ago, see https://docs.google.com/present/edit?id=0AVIsoyl05MRmZGNwY2N...

BTW, the OP talks about needing a separate security group for the puppets but last I checked, the default security group on EC2 makes the machines you own visible to each other and nobody else's that you haven't explicitly permitted. So I think all of that was unnecessary.

A Puppet provisioner was recently committed to Vagrant.

The equivalent to chef-solo in puppet is "puppet apply". It's very handy for developing puppet recipes on an offline virtual machine.

The huge advantage to Chef is that it's just ruby, where as Puppet has it's own syntax for recipes.

Another light-weight alternative for configuring new servers is Babushka: http://babushka.me/

Puppet (as of 2.6) has a pure Ruby DSL. Puppet and Chef are rapidly converging on the same feature set, at this point its like arguing .rpm vs .deb. There are certainly differences and if you spend a ton of time with both tools you will have a favorite, but fundamentally they both serve the same purpose and will enable you to get the job done.

It's amusing how every article about Puppet gets trolled by the Chef group. Is there ever a useful technology that doesn't inspire holy wars?

No. I don't believe there ever can be. For a specific technology choice to become useful -- and more importantly to remain useful -- I think it needs strong competition.

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