Ansible vs. Puppet vs. Chef - any impressions or interest?

[Cervator]

We're finally entering the modern times at work and getting one of these tools set up to help automate all the things. Focus there is Ansible, primarily since it is supposed to be Powershell friendly and we're a Windows shop

I know Puppet is probably the most common one, with Chef also popular in some places. But Ansible seems to be on fire - new hotness and all that.

I want to work on one of them for Terasology's server stuff too, as I've had trouble getting Jenkins itself to directly manage droplets (can create them, but not destroy them, for example). Does anybody have an interest in this topic and a favored tool that they might help out with if we used it?

If not I'll just play around with whichever and pick one I end up liking - or whatever we end up with at work so there's some nice overlap there.

 

[msteiger]

I hear good things about Chef, but I've never used either of the tools you mention. Afaik, Chef doesn't work too well on Windows.

We use Chocolatey! at work, also mainly because it's designed for Windows.
https://chocolatey.org/

 

[Cervator]

Thanks for the pointer - forwarded it to our little group at work since that's where the Windows magic is needed

 

[Cervator]

I've got a working Chef setup now that can spin up and provision stuff on droplets from our Digital Ocean account, while attaching them and the associated cookbooks to a hosted Chef instance under a MovingBlocks org. There's a "Swarm" plugin for Jenkins to let agents configured in a particular way automatically connect to the master, and that way be available to run builds. Then all we need is a queue watcher Groovy job that'll spin up agents to match demand, taking them down when done

Before I do that though we've got a Puppet intro at work Tuesday, so I'll see if I can get a feel there. Puppet sounds like it is a little more solid than Chef, or was when most the articles I found were written, but they do not have the freebie hosted version Chef offers.

IntelliJ 14 (not 13) also has a Chef plugin, but I'm not sure how much it adds beyond simply building on top of a base Ruby project. As far as I can tell you still need to run all commands from the command line, but I suppose you could use the built-in window for that. Supposedly it offers some degree of code completion.