Taste Test: Puppet, Chef, Salt, Ansible

I joined Hacker News 6 and 1/2 years ago and it's been a great community to be a part of. I was one of the early karma leaders and I remember writing a blog post (hilariously embarrassing now) about reaching the top spot with ~650 karma points. I'm sure tptacek and patio11 beat that nowadays before their morning coffee :)

I've only had about 300 visits to DevOpsU.com from HN so far, but of those, over 100 signed up on the email list to be notified of this book.

Given my history with HN and the early interest from here, naturally this is where I'm launching my first book. And here's a special early-bird HN discount link that's good for today's launch: http://gum.co/taste-test/hn

It's very important to me that this be available to everyone that wants it, so if you're a student or for any reason can't afford to buy the book, please contact me: matt@nanobeep.com

Of course, if you can afford it and it will be a win for you, please buy it and support the creation of more business-focused devops training.

Cheers! Matt

I've seen your entry while I was working on a highly long and complicated salt state. And compelled to read it.

Graphics of the site is great, book seems to be a good one too and possibly very helpful for someone new to configuration management mess :). I've run over all four systems to choose one for my tastes so it would be a bit late for me. Thus 39 bucks is a bit high for me to re-run over CM ;). Sorry about that.

I've read your blog posts but a bit disappointed of quantity of them. I would really like to see more of your posts. They seem to be compelling and helpful.

By the way It's a shame that our (devops or sysadmin guys) experiences are this alike and all the mistakes are replicated from corporation to corporation.

Thanks! Yeah, I'm going to be blogging a lot more now that the book is released.

Would love to chat about devops - feel free to email me anytime: matt@nanobeep.com

I love the landing page - I was able to see WTF this thing was all about, and the email opt-in and buy links were persistent but not intrusive enough to piss me off :)

Have an upvote for doing IM right.

I use shell scripts for deploying and configuring new servers. Hope to move to CM soon. Bought your book so I can get a feel for the different choices.

I also bought the book to compare puppet/chef/ansible/salt. If you are interested in learning about puppet (or any of these), I would highly recommend using something like Vagrant to herd virtual machines into example configurations. I have been using puppet for over a year and I have found this configuration to be extremely helpful for testing new scripts. Vagrant knows about puppet/chef/ansible, so you do not even need to install the client software, just point vagrant at your scripts!

I have put together a couple screencasts about Vagrant [1] and Learning puppet with Vagrant [2]. Hope you find these helpful.

[1] http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/4-vagrant

[2] http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/8-learning-puppet-with-vag...

Thanks for the tips. Watched the videos and found them helpful.

It says there's a free chapter but that just points back to the original url. Am I missing something?

It might seem like the same page since the book cover is at the top of both pages. Just in case, here's the direct link: http://devopsu.com/books/taste-test-shell-script-sample-chap...