Chef vs Cisco ACI

Overview

Chef

Stacks1.3K

Followers1.1K

Votes345

Cisco ACI

Stacks9

Followers7

Votes0

Chef vs Cisco ACI: What are the differences?

Scalability and Flexibility: Chef is typically utilized for configuration management and automation, while Cisco ACI is a software-defined networking solution that focuses on network infrastructure management. Chef offers great scalability and flexibility in managing configurations across multiple servers, whereas Cisco ACI is more focused on scaling and managing networking resources efficiently within a data center environment.
Programming Languages: Chef utilizes a domain-specific language (DSL) called Ruby for defining configurations, while Cisco ACI uses APIs and CLI commands for configuration and management. This difference in programming languages may influence the ease of use and learning curve for individuals or teams adopting these technologies.
Primary Focus: Chef primarily targets infrastructure automation and configuration management, enabling organizations to easily deploy and manage servers and applications at scale. On the other hand, Cisco ACI emphasizes network automation and policy-based management, allowing for efficient management and control of network infrastructure within data centers.
Vendor Ecosystem: Chef has a vast ecosystem of community-contributed cookbooks and resources that provide pre-built configurations for various systems and applications, facilitating rapid deployment and management. Cisco ACI, being a networking solution, integrates closely with Cisco hardware and software, enabling seamless management of Cisco networking devices within the ACI fabric.
Deployment Approach: Chef follows a push-based deployment model where the configuration changes are pushed from a central server to the target nodes, ensuring consistency across the infrastructure. In contrast, Cisco ACI adopts a declarative approach where network policies are defined and enforced centrally, allowing for automated provisioning and consistent network configurations across the data center.
Management Complexity: While Chef simplifies the management of configurations and deployments for servers and applications, Cisco ACI deals with the complexity of network infrastructure management, providing centralized control and automation for networking components. The difference lies in the level of abstraction and the focus on infrastructure elements each technology addresses.

In Summary, Chef and Cisco ACI differ in scalability, programming languages, focus, vendor ecosystem, deployment approach, and management complexity, catering to distinct needs in configuration management and network infrastructure management.

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Detailed Comparison

Chef	Cisco ACI
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 represents the industry's most comprehensive data center networking solution with flexible deployment options and the ability to deploy apps based on business needs, not by technology limitations.
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	Automation and consistency; Multicloud acceleration; Protect your network with zero-trust; Assurance and insights
Statistics
Stacks 1.3K	Stacks 9
Followers 1.1K	Followers 7
Votes 345	Votes 0
Pros & Cons
Pros 110 Dynamic and idempotent server configuration 76 Reusable components 47 Integration testing with Vagrant 43 Repeatable 30 Mock testing with Chefspec	No community feedback yet
Integrations
Amazon EC2 Rackspace Cloud Servers Microsoft Azure HP Cloud Compute Joyent Cloud	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Chef, Cisco ACI?

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 Cisco ACI: What are the differences?

Scalability and Flexibility: Chef is typically utilized for configuration management and automation, while Cisco ACI is a software-defined networking solution that focuses on network infrastructure management. Chef offers great scalability and flexibility in managing configurations across multiple servers, whereas Cisco ACI is more focused on scaling and managing networking resources efficiently within a data center environment.
Programming Languages: Chef utilizes a domain-specific language (DSL) called Ruby for defining configurations, while Cisco ACI uses APIs and CLI commands for configuration and management. This difference in programming languages may influence the ease of use and learning curve for individuals or teams adopting these technologies.
Primary Focus: Chef primarily targets infrastructure automation and configuration management, enabling organizations to easily deploy and manage servers and applications at scale. On the other hand, Cisco ACI emphasizes network automation and policy-based management, allowing for efficient management and control of network infrastructure within data centers.
Vendor Ecosystem: Chef has a vast ecosystem of community-contributed cookbooks and resources that provide pre-built configurations for various systems and applications, facilitating rapid deployment and management. Cisco ACI, being a networking solution, integrates closely with Cisco hardware and software, enabling seamless management of Cisco networking devices within the ACI fabric.
Deployment Approach: Chef follows a push-based deployment model where the configuration changes are pushed from a central server to the target nodes, ensuring consistency across the infrastructure. In contrast, Cisco ACI adopts a declarative approach where network policies are defined and enforced centrally, allowing for automated provisioning and consistent network configurations across the data center.
Management Complexity: While Chef simplifies the management of configurations and deployments for servers and applications, Cisco ACI deals with the complexity of network infrastructure management, providing centralized control and automation for networking components. The difference lies in the level of abstraction and the focus on infrastructure elements each technology addresses.

Chef vs Cisco ACI

Overview