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Puppet vs Chef

I hear many people asking which is better Chef or Puppet.  Which is for developers and which is for Admins?  Then, you throw in Ansible and Salt and you get even more drama and stress.  Some companies have pockets of Chef and then, another of Puppet.  Then, someone brings in another tool and everyone is debating and struggling.   Here is my opinion and many of you are not going to like it because it will cause one vendor or team to be critical of my recommendation.

I recommend going with which ever your Ops teams like or uses.  This is the team that needs the most help in this area.  Tools like Puppet and Chef provide the most value when everyone is on the same page and want to use them.  If your Dev teams are shoving Chef down the Ops guys throats, they will never buy in.  If the Ops guys start using any tool, Devs should be able to pick them up easily.  

If you have multiple ops teams, and they are using multiple tools, that might be ok but you will never fully mature them to an enterprise level.  In this case, I recommend evaluating which one has the most mature process and the most code written.  Then, either do all new work in that tool or migrate them all to that tool.  It should be easy but will take some man hours to accomplish.  It is important to treat tools like Chef and Puppet like enterprise tools and not like  tools that can stand on their own for a team.

So you chose a tool, now what?  I will talk about this in a future post.

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