[bryanwb]

I have used both extensively. I found Puppet much easier to get started with but the custom Puppet DSL becomes very quickly constraining. I know that a new pure Ruby DSL is in the works. I found that Chef has a steeper learning curve but many times greater productivity. I do feel that their is much better tooling support for Chef than Puppet, in large part because Chef's pure Ruby approach is much friendlier to Ruby developers. It remains to be seen whether Puppet's coming Ruby DSL will have the same level of functionality.

If you are managing a small application, Chef may feel heavyweight. However, imho, if you can't manage Service-Oriented Architecture w/out a serious configuration management system, be it Chef or Puppet. There are just too many moving parts.

[sciurus]

The Ruby DSL for puppet has been around for a couple years, and recently got some improvements as part of GSoC.

http://puppetlabs.com/blog/ruby-dsl/ http://puppetlabs.com/blog/gsoc-project-ruby-dsl-for-puppet/