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Comment by codypo | Hacker News Reader

I agree with the author that Chef is an incredibly powerful tool and that it has numerous benefits over plain old bash. However, I'm reluctant to actually use it because of its dependencies. Chef relies on CouchDB, RabbitMQ, and Solr, and all of those have non-trivial dependencies as well. Then, with a stack like that, I worry about the overheard involved.

FWIW, Puppet's dependencies are much simpler. I don't know much about Chef vs Puppet, but I can say that from an installation and dependency maintenance POV, Puppet wins.

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(disclosure, I work for Opscode.)

To be clear, those dependencies are required for running your own open source chef server.

You can use chef without the server, as chef-solo, or let Opscode run it for you in the form of Opscode Hosted Chef. We do make it easy to install Chef Server through Chef Solo itself, or with our Ubuntu/Debian apt repository.

I never understood what kind of person/company would trust a hosted chef.

The chef databags/cookbooks tend to contain rather sensitive information (ssh-keys, passwords). Handing all that stuff over to a third-party borders on criminal negligence to me.

So... should nobody use ec2? Or any host for that matter? Sooner or later you're going to have to trust some third-party.

There's a difference between trusting someone with your physical hardware and handing them your credentials on a silver plate.

There's also a pretty harsh difference between the security practices at Amazon and the practices that Opscode displays in their OSS-code.

Cookbooks are accessible via your private key, which Opscode Hosted Chef does not have a copy.

You can choose to encrypt the contents of a data bag using a locally generated (on your hardware, nothing we control) key.

You can use "Hosted Chef," where Opscode hosts all the dependencies for you:

http://www.opscode.com/hosted-chef/

If you've already decided on Chef then the Opscode platform provides great value. You get the best and most knowledgable Chef admins handling your Chef server for a few bucks per hour.

If you haven't decided, it's a great way to try it out.

I'm an opscode customer, but before that, I was playing around with their free plan.

(disclaimer - founder of Puppet)

Just to be clear, this has always been a core goal with Puppet - very low dependencies to make it easy to adopt.

There are some real downsides - we have to do a lot more coding, and it can be tough to get all of the hot newness - but we think the users benefit from a much simpler solution that's much easier to support.

You really should check out CFEngine 3. Very few dependencies (pcre,berkeleydb,openssl), and they also provide free packages with all the dependencies included: http://cfengine.com/download

The memory footprint is about 10 MB, install size maybe 30 MB.

Speaking of dependencies, CFEngine 3 is written in C and has 3 dependencies:

berkeley db,

libcrypo,

and PCRE.

It compiles into small binaries and is usable anywhere - in the cloud, on supercompute clusters, on the desktop or laptop, on a smartphone, in embedded devices.

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