Chef vs Rex

Overview

Chef

Stacks1.3K

Followers1.1K

Votes345

Rex

Stacks11

Followers18

Votes2

GitHub Stars729

Forks219

Chef vs Rex: What are the differences?

What is Chef? Build, destroy and rebuild servers on any public or private cloud. 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.

What is Rex? the friendly automation framework. Rex is an automation framework that combines Perl and Secure Shell (SSH) for a portable and highly flexible approach to data center infrastructure management and software deployment.

Chef and Rex can be categorized as "Server Configuration and Automation" tools.

Some of the features offered by Chef are:

Access to 800+ Reusable Cookbooks
Integration with Leading Cloud Providers
Enterprise Platform Support including Windows and Solaris

On the other hand, Rex provides the following key features:

Puts you in charge: Rex acknowledges that there is more than one way to manage it. It trusts you to be in the best position to decide what to automate and how, allowing you to build the automation tool your situation requires.
Easy to get on board: automate what you are doing today, and add more tomorrow. Rex is instantly usable, making it ideal and friendly for incremental automation.
It's just Perl: Perl is a battle-tested, mature language. Whenever you reach the limitations of the built-in Rex features, a powerful programming language and module ecosystem is directly available at your fingertips to seamlessly extend it even in other languages. So after all, it's not just Perl.

Chef and Rex are both open source tools. Chef with 6.25K GitHub stars and 2.44K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Rex with 620 GitHub stars and 204 GitHub forks.

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CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on Chef, Rex

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	Rex
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.	Rex is an automation framework that combines Perl and Secure Shell (SSH) for a portable and highly flexible approach to data center infrastructure management and software deployment.
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	Puts you in charge: Rex acknowledges that there is more than one way to manage it. It trusts you to be in the best position to decide what to automate and how, allowing you to build the automation tool your situation requires.; Easy to get on board: automate what you are doing today, and add more tomorrow. Rex is instantly usable, making it ideal and friendly for incremental automation.; It's just Perl: Perl is a battle-tested, mature language. Whenever you reach the limitations of the built-in Rex features, a powerful programming language and module ecosystem is directly available at your fingertips to seamlessly extend it even in other languages. So after all, it's not just Perl.
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 729
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 219
Stacks 1.3K	Stacks 11
Followers 1.1K	Followers 18
Votes 345	Votes 2
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 2 Much simple to use or start with, if you know perl
Integrations
Amazon EC2 Rackspace Cloud Servers Microsoft Azure HP Cloud Compute Joyent Cloud	KVM Docker VirtualBox openSUSE OpenStack LXC Ubuntu OpenSSH Perl Void Linux

What are some alternatives to Chef, Rex?

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

Some of the features offered by Chef are:

Access to 800+ Reusable Cookbooks
Integration with Leading Cloud Providers
Enterprise Platform Support including Windows and Solaris

On the other hand, Rex provides the following key features:

Puts you in charge: Rex acknowledges that there is more than one way to manage it. It trusts you to be in the best position to decide what to automate and how, allowing you to build the automation tool your situation requires.
Easy to get on board: automate what you are doing today, and add more tomorrow. Rex is instantly usable, making it ideal and friendly for incremental automation.
It's just Perl: Perl is a battle-tested, mature language. Whenever you reach the limitations of the built-in Rex features, a powerful programming language and module ecosystem is directly available at your fingertips to seamlessly extend it even in other languages. So after all, it's not just Perl.

Chef and Rex are both open source tools. Chef with 6.25K GitHub stars and 2.44K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Rex with 620 GitHub stars and 204 GitHub forks.

Chef vs Rex