· ansible chef devops

Chef, Puppet, Ansible

I’ve been using Chef for years. Since it was in 0.7 and very rough. Before Chef, I was using Puppet. Before Puppet, there was shell scripts.

I switched from Puppet for a few reasons (I’m not sure if they apply anymore though):

Chef may still be the best of breed. It’s great for firing up hosts, configuring, searching, being eventually consistent. But it has a lot of irritating problems which end up wasting time.

I’ve been playing around with ansible for some local projects and it seems to do the trick. The next few posts I will be exploring if it can do everything that chef can do.

tl;dr - Chef is complex. Looking to see if something can do the same thing without the same headaches


  1. A bit of a digression here. The other day I wanted to install Hubot and do some flowdock integration. What happenned? First thing, go search and find two cookbooks . Download them. Install them on the chef server with berkshelf. I mean, a cookbook has 1.7 million downloads, that’s got to mean something, right? And here’s the thing, the cookbook looks great, but it just didn’t work. It failed because it has a dependency on the nodejs cookbook which changed the name the scripts the hubot cookbook was including. So I spent 30 minutes messing around with the hubot cookbook, followed by 30 minutes writing my own cookbook to do the same thing. [return]
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