[trotsky]

As a Chef user, what are the honest selling points of cuisine vs. something like Chef Solo? I'm definitely up for moving to something that isn't as heavy as Chef but so far nothing has really clicked. Is it just that you preferred python? Looking at the sample code it doesn't seem more compact or sraight forward than the ruby equivalents. The excellent knife cloud bootstrap plugins, good hypervisor metadata coverage and active community makes it hard to say goodbye.

I'm sure you're not looking to go head to head with opscode or plabs, but what's the elevator pitch? I'd really love something that ended up being much more concise for the 90% of the deploys that are dead simple.

(and no, I haven't tried ansible yet)

[hdeshev]

Regarding cuisine vs. Chef Solo... I think it mostly depends on what your scripts do. In my opinion, Fabric/Cuisine make it absurdly easy to execute commands against a remote server and most of the time that's enough for a decent deployment. Chef's execution API is, to put it mildly, clumsy. I cringe every time I have to type something like:

execute "#{virtualenv_dir}/bin/pip install -r #{requirements_file}" do user deploy_user group deploy_user end

IMO Chef shines when you have to move a lot of config files and generate node- and role-specific configs. I feel it's a lot simpler to just have recipe-specific files and templates packaged with the recipe and move them over with commands like cookbook_file and template.

Right now we are using both the technologies. Our stacks are Chef-based since we want people to be comfortable with reading (and possibly modifying) its code. We also reuse a lot of the Opscode recipes which simply do not exist for Fabric/Cuisine. Fabric and Cuisine have their place when we bootstrap a server and prepare the Chef environment and at several odd places where they keep things running together.