[arckiearc]

Once you get rolling with Chef or Puppet, updating your servers feels great - no need to manually fiddle with shell scripts, or wonder "have I installed that package on all my machines?"

Getting to that point can take quite a bit of effort though. In my most recent attempt to install a Chef server on a fresh Ubuntu box, I quit the installation halfway through as I realised I wanted to change some of the values I'd entered into the setup script. After re-running the script I encountered errors, and all my attempts at scrubbing the aborted installation failed. It was easier to just start with a fresh image. I had these sorts of experiences all the time when using Chef and Puppet, they were really frustrating to setup.

I felt more comfortable writing my scripts in Chef because it didn't limit my ability to use Ruby, and the more relaxed approach to handling dependencies suited me. Puppet was easier to setup, had better documentation, and behaved more reliably for me. Neither seems like a clear winner, but I haven't spent a lot of time with them in about a year now, so things may have changed!