[cparedes]

Author here. They do, though for a certain set of problems, you can get away with using things like Chef for coordinating lots of information between a lot of machines.

My point, however, was that tools should never be the focal point of solving a problem - if you recognize the problem first as a distributed locking problem, or as a configuration problem, then you can start deriving a solution (and maybe that solution might have Zookeeper in it, maybe you'll write a new piece of software, maybe you'll use Chef, etc.)

[ryanpers]

One of the biggest problems as I noted in a different comment is that chef doesnt solve _software_ deployment. Configuration management and "best effort file pushes" is not really appropriate for running a website. Sure you could do something with chef, but waiting 20 minutes for a rollback would be pretty lame-o.

The issue here is software push and service orchestration. How do you do a rolling restart of a cluster in an automated fashion?

As for 'configuration management', I feel like puppet, chef, etc arent catch all solutions for 'i want my config to be the same on all machines' for the above mentioned 20 minute cycle.