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0 pointsJustinGarrison11y ago0 comments

From experience here is some of the CM tool downsides that might help you

Chef - Ruby DSL is hard if you don't know Ruby. Lots of infrastructure to manage (if not using hosted Chef). On the fly orchestration requires 3rd party tools or Enterprise License.

Puppet - Custom DSL is json-y which for some is easier than Ruby. Scaling problems because puppetmaster compiles the manifests (instead of having nodes compile). 2 tools/interfaces for config vs orchestration (mcollective) gets confusing and not very consistent with features.

Ansible - pretty much a lot of what the article said. A bit slow and custom loops/dsl sometimes gets confusing. Managing hosts file is mostly the only "infrastructure" you need, but still is annoying. No Windows support (yet)

Salt - Not as mature so it can't do some advanced stuff Puppet/Chef can do. Last I looked at web UI (Halite) it was not much to look at. Hardly any integration into 3rd party tools (most favor Puppet)

Don't get me wrong, I love CM tools and the pros list would be 1000x longer than cons. But they all have some big downsides that hopefully will get better in the future.

0 comments

mpdehaan211y ago

Sorry to keep replying to this one - slight correction on recent Ansible windows support if interested:

http://docs.ansible.com/intro_windows.html

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 pointsJustinGarrison11y ago0 comments

From experience here is some of the CM tool downsides that might help you

Chef - Ruby DSL is hard if you don't know Ruby. Lots of infrastructure to manage (if not using hosted Chef). On the fly orchestration requires 3rd party tools or Enterprise License.

Don't get me wrong, I love CM tools and the pros list would be 1000x longer than cons. But they all have some big downsides that hopefully will get better in the future.