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Comment by emilecantin | Hacker News Reader

Puppet is one of the DevOps configuration languages. IIRC it had mostly "won" against Chef, and subsequently "lost" against Ansible.

Perforce is basically Git, but shittier and proprietary. I think it's mostly popular in the games industry.

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Interesting. My recollection is that Chef and Ansible both completely ran roughshod over Puppet, and that Puppet is now in the "antiquated tools that used to be relevant" bucket.

Anecdotal, yeah. But DevOps is my daily work, and I like to think I keep an eye on the tools ecosystem.

That was my sense too back than, Puppet had early traction, but lost out to Chef, and then Ansible turned out to be the marathoner of the 3.

Seems like doing $100M+ in ARR (as hinted in the article) is a win. Even more because Chef was acquired for $220M. I think Perforce will pay a bit more for Puppet.

Their last round in 2020 ($40M from Black Round) was debt financing, not investment. That to me is generally a sign of a struggling company. And when the CEO of such a company claims they were looking for other companies to acquire, it raises a number of questions.

Back in the day (~10 years ago?) when the company I worked for was looking at replacing our internal custom provisioning and desired state configuration tooling it was Ansible that won out. We were running a mixed fleet of Windows and Linux hosts - the company was an ISP and shared hoster.

At that point in time both Puppet and Chef needed agents to be installed on your servers and we really didn't want to have to manage another background service running on hundreds to thousands of boxes. Ansible didn't have this requirement.

Also Windows support was pretty sketchy on Chef and Puppet back then, to the point of being almost studiously ignored, Ansible provided remote PowerShell support. And that was primarily the deciding factor.

I used Puppet around 2012. I remember looking at Ansible, and immediately seeing that its agentless, SSH-based approach was highly preferable. But every time i discussed it with the devops experts in and contracted to our company, they assured me that agentless was terrible, and had too many disadvantages, and couldn't scale.

And yet, here we are. Puppet grew an agentless mode, and then lost anyway. My former company's deep investment in integrating Puppet and MCollective into our infrastructure tooling must look increasingly like a millstone. Oh well, it was all interesting to work on.

The shorthand at the time--don't know how accurate--was that sysadmins tended to prefer Puppet and devs tended to prefer Chef. But, yes, I remember from attending Config mgmt camp a few times during the period that Ansible was really spiking in popularity. From what I saw, Ansible was easier to get started with and probably more appropriate for more general IT automation tasks.

Perforce is probably more widespread than people realise, and not just games industry although they've focused more on the benefits they bring to that field in recent years. Perforce were offering a good quality version control system for years before the initial release of git, as a result it can still be found in many older companies who have projects that are older than git itself and haven't migrated.

Git has obviously won the VCS battle now in most fields, but version control used to be a much more diverse and interesting space; I'd used Perforce, SVN and Mercurial professionally before git just won out most places.

Perforce is "Git for people who don't want to merge a 200MB binary FBX asset". Their core value proposition is more like SVN or Microsoft's Version Control in that people check out a file and then only they are allowed to modify it until they check it back in. That way, merges can be avoided.

And yes, it's very popular in the games industry, because even Git+LFS is very painful if you have merge conflicts.

It's popular in the gaming industry because it handles large individual assets better than anything out there.

Hence the invention of things like Git LFS:

https://git-lfs.github.com/

Thanks for the no-bullshit explanation - much appreciated! That letter makes me think approximately the same thing I think to myself when someone tells me their sister got married: like, "hmm, I'm not really sure why you're telling me this, but good for them I guess."

> Perforce is basically Git, but shittier and proprietary. I think it's mostly popular in the games industry.

I think Google also uses Perforce. It's understandable because Google started before git.

They don't, though they used to long ago.

https://m-cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-st...

Great summary! This should have been in the FAQ

p4 was known to handle large binary blobs well, vs most of the other vcss.

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