[thibaut_barrere]

I tracked my time when initially learning chef, and it took me ~100 hours to be comfortable with what I needed (2.5 years ago roughly if I remember well).

The learning curve was fairly steep for me, but then I don't regret it, since I got to use it as a freelancer just right after on multiple gigs, and that I can now extend EngineYard recipes or think about using AWS OpsWork without much sweat.

From a purely single-person building app for yourself kind of perspective though (with one or two servers), it's a deep investment IMO...

People should have a look at http://ansible.cc for an apparently much lightweight alternative.

[danso]

100...hours? Wow, the documentation for Chef must really be bad because I guess I still don't know what it's meant to do, despite going through the Hello World process. I thought it was just a framework for the batch commands needed to set up a machine. What was the hardest part to feel comfortable with? The syntax? The conventions for maintaining and executing recipes?

[natbobc]

Hi Danso, fundamentally Chef, CFEngine and Puppet are all Configuration Management (CM) systems. They are a programmatic way to specify what a "host" or group of "hosts" should look like using a dependency graph. Basically it builds the dependency graph and works from the root to the leaves one level at a time.

As an example let's say you want to install MongoDB on a new Ubuntu machine, you have the following dependencies in approximate order;

* Add MongoDB Apt Repo to apt list. * Add MongoDB repository key. * apt-get update. * apt-get install mongodb. * Configure /etc/mongodb.conf to your liking. * Restart mongodb.

Depending on how you implement it CM will allow you to make the process cookie cutter.

Want a new test environment? Spin one up and run your CM against the servers. Want to try that hot new cloud provider? Ditto.

I think it's worth the investment unless you're just doing apps that have a very short shelf life (e.g. marketing apps that live for no longer than a few months).

Kind Regards, Nathan

[mnarayan01]

The documentation for Chef is not great, but what makes it problematic (at least when I was first learning it) is that it has a tendency to not correspond to the currently released version (sometimes it's outdated, but more annoyingly, sometimes it's pre-dated).