Chef, Puppet, & Ansible - Comparing Leading Configuration Systems

February 15th, 2017Ron Harnik - Product Marketing MgrAlex Green - Technical Content Writer

Introduction

Alex GreenTechnical Content Writer

Ron HarnikProduct Marketing Manager

Agenda• What are Orchestration Systems? • Chef, Puppet & Ansible - an overview• Demonstrate use cases for orchestration systems

Scalr Architecture

Enterprise Scopes

Configuration Systems• This isn’t just writing scripts: Use dev. best practices like

version control, testing, batched deployments, use of design patterns

• Falls under Infrastructure As Code (Iaas): writing code to provision and manage your servers in addition to automating processes.

Why Configuration Systems?• Reproduce a server for scaling or testing• Build systems to be platform independent • Clearly defined software/scripts • Dynamic configurations

Why Configuration Systems?• Automatically configure monitoring when new systems

are built• Recover from a disaster quickly (by defining proper

application state should be)• Get new employees up to speed quickly

Consider• Heavy planning prior to implementation such as choosing

the right tools• Bad configurations could get duplicated on all the servers• Configuration drift - when server configurations are

modified through hot-fixes without modifying the templates)

• Maintaining strict discipline isn’t easy

Chef• Released in 2009• Written in Ruby - great for Developers and DevOps to

finally get along• The most popular of the orchestration/automation tools

on the market• Strong community and collection of resources (Chef

Supermarket)

ChefGood:

• Easier to get productive and stay productive • Ideal for complex infrastructure work Bad:

• Chef takes onboarding time.• Collaboration doesn't scale well. • Runlist ordering can get messy

Ansible• Released in 2012• Agentless structure• Super simple to use - written in python• Designed to be light

Ansible Playbook Structure

AnsibleGood:• Great for single point in time changes• Time to value is great - helps users define infrastructure

faster• Streamline the mundane tasks that sysadmins have to

endureBad:• Because over SSH, slow at scale

Puppet• Released in 2005• Built for the enterprise, incredible support• Uses Client/Server Architecture like Chef• Puppet Master + Puppet Agents

Puppet Enterprise UI

PuppetGood:• Like Chef, Puppet is definitely the DevOps tool to define

and deploy company infrastructure to new servers• Tons of modules• Scales across teams wellBad:• Hard to pick up and experiment with • compared to chef, the terminology was more complicated

Thank You!If you have any questions or feedback on using these configuration management systems feel free to reach out to us at alexg@scalr.com and ron@scalr.com.