Chef vs Puppet Bolt

Overview

Chef

Stacks1.3K

Followers1.1K

Votes345

Puppet Bolt

Stacks12

Followers25

Votes9

GitHub Stars539

Forks227

Chef vs Puppet Bolt: What are the differences?

Configuration Management vs Task Automation: Chef is primarily focused on configuration management, allowing users to define the desired state of their infrastructure through code. On the other hand, Puppet Bolt is more geared towards task automation, enabling users to execute ad-hoc tasks across remote nodes without the need for pre-defined configurations.
Agentless vs Agent-based: Puppet Bolt operates in an agentless manner, meaning it does not require a persistent agent to be installed on managed nodes. This makes it easier to deploy and manage in environments where installing agents is not feasible. In contrast, Chef relies on agents (Chef Infra Client) running on each managed node to enforce configurations and policies.
Language and Community Support: Chef uses Ruby as its primary language for defining infrastructure code, while Puppet Bolt supports multiple languages such as Ruby, Python, and PowerShell. Additionally, Chef has a larger and more established community compared to Puppet Bolt, providing a wealth of resources and support for users.
Scalability: Chef is known for its scalability, making it ideal for managing large and complex infrastructures. It can handle thousands of nodes efficiently through features like data-driven configuration management. Puppet Bolt, while capable of executing tasks across multiple nodes concurrently, may not be as optimized for managing extremely large infrastructures.
Ease of Use and Learning Curve: Puppet Bolt is often considered more user-friendly and easier to get started with, especially for beginners in the realm of configuration management and automation. Its straightforward approach to task execution and agentless architecture make it a popular choice for quick wins. Chef, on the other hand, may have a steeper learning curve due to its more extensive feature set and configuration management capabilities.
Commercial Support and Ecosystem: Chef has a commercial offering (Chef Automate) that provides additional features, support, and enterprise-level capabilities, making it a preferred choice for organizations with stringent production requirements. Puppet, the company behind Puppet Bolt, also offers a commercial product (Puppet Enterprise) with similar benefits, but the ecosystem and third-party integrations for Chef are often more extensive.

In Summary, Chef and Puppet Bolt differ in their approach to configuration management, agent architecture, supported languages, scalability, ease of use, and commercial support.

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Advice on Chef, Puppet Bolt

Anonymous

Sep 17, 2019

Needs advice

I'm just getting started using Vagrant to help automate setting up local VMs to set up a Kubernetes cluster (development and experimentation only). (Yes, I do know about minikube)

I'm looking for a tool to help install software packages, setup users, etc..., on these VMs. I'm also fairly new to Ansible, Chef, and Puppet. What's a good one to start with to learn? I might decide to try all 3 at some point for my own curiosity.

The most important factors for me are simplicity, ease of use, shortest learning curve.

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Detailed Comparison

Chef	Puppet Bolt
Chef enables you to manage and scale cloud infrastructure with no downtime or interruptions. Freely move applications and configurations from one cloud to another. Chef is integrated with all major cloud providers including Amazon EC2, VMWare, IBM Smartcloud, Rackspace, OpenStack, Windows Azure, HP Cloud, Google Compute Engine, Joyent Cloud and others.	It is an open source orchestration tool that automates the manual work it takes to maintain your infrastructure. Use it to automate tasks that you perform on an as-needed basis or as part of a greater orchestration workflow.
Access to 800+ Reusable Cookbooks;Integration with Leading Cloud Providers;Enterprise Platform Support including Windows and Solaris;Create, Bootstrap and Manage OpenStack Clouds;Easy Installation with 'one-click' Omnibus Installer;Automatic System Discovery with Ohai;Text-Based Search Capabilities;Multiple Environment Support;"Knife" Command Line Interface;"Dry Run" Mode for Testing Potential Changes;Manage 10,000+ Nodes on a Single Chef Server;Available as a Hosted Service;Centralized Activity and Resource Reporting;"Push" Command and Control Client Runs;Multi-Tenancy;Role-Based Access Control [RBAC];High Availability Installation Support and Verification;Centralized Authentication Using LDAP or Active Directory	Prebuilt tasks; Automate deployments; Open source; Agent-less or agent-based; Reuse existing scripts; Ruby-support; Python-support; Bash-support; Powershell-support; Workflow orchestration
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 539
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 227
Stacks 1.3K	Stacks 12
Followers 1.1K	Followers 25
Votes 345	Votes 9
Pros & Cons
Pros 110 Dynamic and idempotent server configuration 76 Reusable components 47 Integration testing with Vagrant 43 Repeatable 30 Mock testing with Chefspec	Pros 3 Simple 2 Easy to Install 2 Agentless 2 Powerful
Integrations
Amazon EC2 Rackspace Cloud Servers Microsoft Azure HP Cloud Compute Joyent Cloud	Python Linux PowerShell Windows macOS

What are some alternatives to Chef, Puppet Bolt?

Ansible

Ansible is an IT automation tool. It can configure systems, deploy software, and orchestrate more advanced IT tasks such as continuous deployments or zero downtime rolling updates. Ansible’s goals are foremost those of simplicity and maximum ease of use.

Terraform

With Terraform, you describe your complete infrastructure as code, even as it spans multiple service providers. Your servers may come from AWS, your DNS may come from CloudFlare, and your database may come from Heroku. Terraform will build all these resources across all these providers in parallel.

Capistrano

Capistrano is a remote server automation tool. It supports the scripting and execution of arbitrary tasks, and includes a set of sane-default deployment workflows.

Puppet Labs

Puppet is an automated administrative engine for your Linux, Unix, and Windows systems and performs administrative tasks (such as adding users, installing packages, and updating server configurations) based on a centralized specification.

Salt

Salt is a new approach to infrastructure management. Easy enough to get running in minutes, scalable enough to manage tens of thousands of servers, and fast enough to communicate with them in seconds. Salt delivers a dynamic communication bus for infrastructures that can be used for orchestration, remote execution, configuration management and much more.

Fabric

Fabric is a Python (2.5-2.7) library and command-line tool for streamlining the use of SSH for application deployment or systems administration tasks. It provides a basic suite of operations for executing local or remote shell commands (normally or via sudo) and uploading/downloading files, as well as auxiliary functionality such as prompting the running user for input, or aborting execution.

AWS OpsWorks

Start from templates for common technologies like Ruby, Node.JS, PHP, and Java, or build your own using Chef recipes to install software packages and perform any task that you can script. AWS OpsWorks can scale your application using automatic load-based or time-based scaling and maintain the health of your application by detecting failed instances and replacing them. You have full control of deployments and automation of each component

cPanel

It is an industry leading hosting platform with world-class support. It is globally empowering hosting providers through fully-automated point-and-click hosting platform by hosting-centric professionals

Webmin

It is a web-based interface for system administration for Unix. Using any modern web browser, you can setup user accounts, Apache, DNS, file sharing and much more. It removes the need to manually edit Unix configuration files.

Mina

Mina works really fast because it's a deploy Bash script generator. It generates an entire procedure as a Bash script and runs it remotely in the server. Compare this to the likes of Vlad or Capistrano, where each command is run separately on their own SSH sessions. Mina only creates one SSH session per deploy, minimizing the SSH connection overhead.

Related Comparisons

Chef vs Puppet Bolt: What are the differences?

Configuration Management vs Task Automation: Chef is primarily focused on configuration management, allowing users to define the desired state of their infrastructure through code. On the other hand, Puppet Bolt is more geared towards task automation, enabling users to execute ad-hoc tasks across remote nodes without the need for pre-defined configurations.
Agentless vs Agent-based: Puppet Bolt operates in an agentless manner, meaning it does not require a persistent agent to be installed on managed nodes. This makes it easier to deploy and manage in environments where installing agents is not feasible. In contrast, Chef relies on agents (Chef Infra Client) running on each managed node to enforce configurations and policies.
Language and Community Support: Chef uses Ruby as its primary language for defining infrastructure code, while Puppet Bolt supports multiple languages such as Ruby, Python, and PowerShell. Additionally, Chef has a larger and more established community compared to Puppet Bolt, providing a wealth of resources and support for users.
Scalability: Chef is known for its scalability, making it ideal for managing large and complex infrastructures. It can handle thousands of nodes efficiently through features like data-driven configuration management. Puppet Bolt, while capable of executing tasks across multiple nodes concurrently, may not be as optimized for managing extremely large infrastructures.
Ease of Use and Learning Curve: Puppet Bolt is often considered more user-friendly and easier to get started with, especially for beginners in the realm of configuration management and automation. Its straightforward approach to task execution and agentless architecture make it a popular choice for quick wins. Chef, on the other hand, may have a steeper learning curve due to its more extensive feature set and configuration management capabilities.
Commercial Support and Ecosystem: Chef has a commercial offering (Chef Automate) that provides additional features, support, and enterprise-level capabilities, making it a preferred choice for organizations with stringent production requirements. Puppet, the company behind Puppet Bolt, also offers a commercial product (Puppet Enterprise) with similar benefits, but the ecosystem and third-party integrations for Chef are often more extensive.

In Summary, Chef and Puppet Bolt differ in their approach to configuration management, agent architecture, supported languages, scalability, ease of use, and commercial support.

Chef vs Puppet Bolt

Overview