Re:Puppet vs Chef, Fight
by techscruggs on Sunday October 09, 2011 @02:10PM
(#3090925)
Agreed on all points.
Guaranteeing the entire installation is "documented and replicable" is huge. Chef/Puppet can become a large part of you disaster recovery plan and increases the "bus number" in ops.
The value in this is immediately apparent after the first time you have had to rebuild a server that you inherited.
For keeping track of os-level packages and the like, I find Puppet much better than something I could build myself. It doesn't just take care of the initial setup, but also handles incremental changes. And it does so in a largely declarative language. It all guarantees that the entire installation is documented and replicable.