On 12 May 2016 at 08:22, Götz Reinicke - IT Koordinator < goetz.reinicke at 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-puppet-vs-chef-vs-ansible-vs-salt.html