For better understanding, we will compare Chef with some of the most popular
infrastructure automation tools, which are the competitors of Chef.
Chef versus Puppet
The following are the key differences between Puppet and Chef:
• Puppet uses a custom, JSON-like language. Although a Ruby option is
available with Puppet, while in Chef, you write in Ruby. The chef is purely a
Domain-Specific Language (DSL), which extends the Ruby language to the
resources that are useful to manage hosts and their applications. The unique
quality of Ruby is that if you are writing, then you can get simple stuff done
even without actually knowing Ruby. Therefore, Chef is preferred by most
of the software developers or web developers.
• Puppet is still struggling with proper documentation and webinar
sessions for learners and developers, while Chef is very accurate with its
documentation, training materials, recent updates, and releases. It has hosted
various webinar sessions. Therefore, from a learning perspective, Chef is the
preferred choice over Puppet.
It is true that Chef is very much influenced by Puppet. Adam Jacobs
contributed to the creation of Chef and he was once a Puppet user himself.
Therefore, it is obvious that developers of Chef have learned from Puppet
itself to make Chef much better and more flexible for users.
• Chef provides many more cloud integration options. We can integrate
through APIs to different types of cloud providers such as AWS,
Rackspace, MS Azure, OpenStack, Eucalyptus, VMware ESXi, VMware
vCenter, VMware vCloud, and vCloud Air. While in Puppet, these kinds
of integrations are not properly enabled, although Puppet supports cloud
providers to some extent.
• It has been observed that the Chef community provides very good support
and gives quick responses to user queries for any problem faced while
installing, using, and debugging Chef scripts. While using Puppet, we cannot
expect promptness in response, therefore, Chef users are much more satisfied
than Puppet users. Hence, Chef has become a more preferable choice of
developers. Chef has a variety of choices according to customer use cases.
We can use private, open-source Chef or hosted Chef according to our use
case, but in Puppet, we don't have this type of option. Therefore, Chef is
much more flexible in terms of usage.
Chef versus CFEngine
The following are the key differences between Chef and CFEngine:
• CFEngine is very much older than Chef; it was developed by Mark
Burgess in 1993. CFEngine is also called the grandfather of configuration
automation tools.
• CFEngine runs on C while Chef runs on Ruby. This is the major problem
with CFEngine because C is a low-level language and most of the
communities don't support C. It takes much effort to learn CFEngine, while
The chef can be learned easily by developers. Therefore, Chef is the preferred
option nowadays for system administrators with limited coding experience.
• CFEngine has been present in the market for the last 20 years. According to
CFEngine's site, currently, they are managing more than 10 million nodes
and have a good list of customer support, but as we know, the current IT
infrastructure scenario is very much based on virtualization and cloud. Chef
serves perfectly for current industrial automation needs and is the preferred
choice of reputed organizations such as Amazon and Facebook.
• One more problem with CFEngine is its documentation. Being an open
source community, they have less focus on the documentation of the latest
releases and learning tutorials, while Chef has a strong community support
for proper documentation and provides the latest training material to all users.
Therefore, the popularity of Chef is increasing day by day and it has gone on
to become the most popular open-source automation tool.
Here, we got the conceptual understanding of Chef and its effectiveness over other
configuration automation competitors. In Chef, there are different components that
interact with one another during the execution and installation of scripts, which we
are going to learn in the next chapter.
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