On 12 May 2016 at 08:22, Götz Reinicke - IT Koordinator < goetz.reinicke@filmakademie.de> wrote:
Hi,
we see a growing need for a better Configuration management for our servers.
Are there any known good resources for a comparison of e.g. Puppet, Chef, Ansible etc?
What would you suggest and why? :)
Puppet is great for central control with automatic runs making systems right and keeping them in line, it's not an orchestration tool though - however it's commonly supplemented with something like rundeck and/or mcollective to assist here.
Chef is great for a ruby house - you'll need to brush up on your ruby as writing cookbooks is heavily tied to the language. Historically it was very debian focused with issues like selinux problems. I believe these have been generally resolved though.
Ansible is a great orchestration tool and excellent for going from base to a configured system. It is less of a tool to keep things inline with a base however with no central automated runs (ignoring Tower which is not FOSS yet).
Ansible is also much simpler to get into given the tasks are just like following through a script for defining how to make a system, as opposed to learning an actual DSL like required for understanding puppet modules.
There's a growing pattern of using ansible for orchestration alongside puppet for definitions as well (there's a specific ansible module to carry out a puppet run).
I've not looked at salt at all personally.
Came across this article a while back: http://www.infoworld.com/article/2609482/data-center/data-center-review-pupp...