| I've recently started using chef for config management. It's Ruby, I'm Ruby so it was always going to win over Puppet there. Off the top off my head observations: * Conceptually clean and very powerful * Quick and easy to write new cookbooks from scratch, but the public repo of cookbooks is more useful for code examples than day-to-day use * Documentation (the wiki) is patchy but improving * The webui could do with some love (buggy, plus some useful tasks like executing a chef run are missing) and the CLI, knife, is a bit odd and bloated with stuff that belongs elsewhere * The chef server stack (Merb, Solr, Couchdb) needs babysitting * Bootstrapping is still a pain (ain't it always?) * There are some inconsistencies and a bit of churn in the API The Ruby DSL has some interesting quirks. Recipes are compiled in one phase and executed in a later phase. So just to make a simple log entry: ruby_block do
block do
Chef::Log.info("File created!")
end
end
Eww.But overall it's an effective tool for an essential task. |