Pallet vs. Chef by Steve Hall

From the article:

> A glaring omission in Chef is the lack of proper support for push deployments; the agents can only ‘pull’ new instructions by periodically checking in with the master. So you can’t deploy changes instantaneously, you have to wait until the next scheduled timeslot when the agents dial back home.

This is not a practical concern; one can SSH into a server and tell it to converge immediately, if needed. The server will then do whatever it needs to update.

See also:

* http://blog.ona.io/general/2014/05/05/automated-infrastructu...

* http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Pallet-DevOps-for-the-JVM

I remember hearing that Pallet may not be deterministic in the same way as Chef (i.e. convergence happens in a deterministic way), but I'm having a hard time tracking down or proving such a claim.