Chef vs Nomad

Overview

Chef

Stacks1.3K

Followers1.1K

Votes345

Nomad

Stacks256

Followers344

Votes32

GitHub Stars15.9K

Forks2.0K

Chef vs Nomad: What are the differences?

Configuration Management: One key difference between Chef and Nomad is that Chef is a configuration management tool that focuses on automating infrastructure provisioning, while Nomad is a container orchestration tool that manages and schedules Docker containers across a cluster of servers.
Programming Language: Another significant difference is that Chef uses Ruby for writing infrastructure as code, defining configurations using Ruby-based DSL, whereas Nomad uses HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language) for defining job specifications, making it simpler for operators to understand and write configurations.
Scale and Scope: Chef is more suitable for larger infrastructures with complex configuration needs, offering a wide range of features for managing large-scale environments, whereas Nomad is designed for smaller to medium-sized deployments, providing a lightweight and simple way to manage containerized applications.
Resource Utilization: Nomad has better resource utilization and denser packing of containers on a server, optimizing resource allocation for improved efficiency, while Chef may not have the same level of resource efficiency due to its broader focus on configuration management rather than container orchestration.
High Availability: Nomad has built-in high availability features like leader election and distributed task scheduling, ensuring resilience and fault tolerance, whereas Chef requires additional setup and configurations to achieve high availability, making it relatively more complex in terms of achieving fault tolerance.
Ecosystem Integration: Chef has a more mature ecosystem with a wide range of cookbooks, resources, and community support available, providing a rich set of tools for managing infrastructure, whereas Nomad, being more focused on container orchestration, may have a smaller ecosystem but integrates well with other HashiCorp tools like Consul and Vault.

In Summary, the key differences between Chef and Nomad lie in their focus on configuration management versus container orchestration, programming languages used, scalability, resource utilization, high availability features, and ecosystem integration.

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Advice on Chef, Nomad

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	Nomad
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.	Nomad is a cluster manager, designed for both long lived services and short lived batch processing workloads. Developers use a declarative job specification to submit work, and Nomad ensures constraints are satisfied and resource utilization is optimized by efficient task packing. Nomad supports all major operating systems and virtualized, containerized, or standalone applications.
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	Handles the scheduling and upgrading of the applications over time; With built-in dry-run execution, Nomad shows what scheduling decisions it will take before it takes them. Operators can approve or deny these changes to create a safe and reproducible workflow; Nomad runs applications and ensures they keep running in failure scenarios. In addition to long-running services, Nomad can schedule batch jobs, distributed cron jobs, and parameterized jobs; Stream logs, send signals, and interact with the file system of scheduled applications. These operator-friendly commands bring the familiar debugging tools to a scheduled world
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 15.9K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 2.0K
Stacks 1.3K	Stacks 256
Followers 1.1K	Followers 344
Votes 345	Votes 32
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 7 Built in Consul integration 6 Easy setup 4 Bult-in Vault integration 3 Built-in federation support 2 Autoscaling support Cons 3 Easy to start with 1 Small comunity 1 HCL language for configuration, an unpopular DSL
Integrations
Amazon EC2 Rackspace Cloud Servers Microsoft Azure HP Cloud Compute Joyent Cloud	Consul Docker Vault

What are some alternatives to Chef, Nomad?

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

Apache Mesos

Apache Mesos is a cluster manager that simplifies the complexity of running applications on a shared pool of servers.

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.

Related Comparisons

Chef vs Nomad: What are the differences?

Configuration Management: One key difference between Chef and Nomad is that Chef is a configuration management tool that focuses on automating infrastructure provisioning, while Nomad is a container orchestration tool that manages and schedules Docker containers across a cluster of servers.
Programming Language: Another significant difference is that Chef uses Ruby for writing infrastructure as code, defining configurations using Ruby-based DSL, whereas Nomad uses HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language) for defining job specifications, making it simpler for operators to understand and write configurations.
Scale and Scope: Chef is more suitable for larger infrastructures with complex configuration needs, offering a wide range of features for managing large-scale environments, whereas Nomad is designed for smaller to medium-sized deployments, providing a lightweight and simple way to manage containerized applications.
Resource Utilization: Nomad has better resource utilization and denser packing of containers on a server, optimizing resource allocation for improved efficiency, while Chef may not have the same level of resource efficiency due to its broader focus on configuration management rather than container orchestration.
High Availability: Nomad has built-in high availability features like leader election and distributed task scheduling, ensuring resilience and fault tolerance, whereas Chef requires additional setup and configurations to achieve high availability, making it relatively more complex in terms of achieving fault tolerance.
Ecosystem Integration: Chef has a more mature ecosystem with a wide range of cookbooks, resources, and community support available, providing a rich set of tools for managing infrastructure, whereas Nomad, being more focused on container orchestration, may have a smaller ecosystem but integrates well with other HashiCorp tools like Consul and Vault.

Chef vs Nomad

Overview