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Chef

1.3K
1.1K
+ 1
345
Octopus Deploy

399
493
+ 1
118
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Chef vs Octopus Deploy: 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 Octopus Deploy? Automated deployment for .NET. Octopus works with your build server to enable reliable, secure, automated releases of ASP.NET applications and Windows Services into test, staging and production environments, whether they are in the cloud or on-premises.

Chef and Octopus Deploy are primarily classified as "Server Configuration and Automation" and "Deployment as a Service" tools respectively.

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, Octopus Deploy provides the following key features:

  • Deploy on-premises or to the cloud, securely
  • Built for .NET developers
  • Configuration and scripting

"Dynamic and idempotent server configuration" is the primary reason why developers consider Chef over the competitors, whereas "Powerful" was stated as the key factor in picking Octopus Deploy.

Chef is an open source tool with 5.83K GitHub stars and 2.35K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Chef's open source repository on GitHub.

According to the StackShare community, Chef has a broader approval, being mentioned in 359 company stacks & 80 developers stacks; compared to Octopus Deploy, which is listed in 45 company stacks and 15 developer stacks.

Advice on Chef and Octopus Deploy
Needs advice
on
AnsibleAnsibleChefChef
and
Puppet LabsPuppet Labs

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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Replies (2)
Recommends
on
AnsibleAnsible

I have been working with Puppet and Ansible. The reason why I prefer ansible is the distribution of it. Ansible is more lightweight and therefore more popular. This leads to situations, where you can get fully packaged applications for ansible (e.g. confluent) supported by the vendor, but only incomplete packages for Puppet.

The only advantage I would see with Puppet if someone wants to use Foreman. This is still better supported with Puppet.

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Gabriel Pa
Recommends
on
KubernetesKubernetes
at

If you are just starting out, might as well learn Kubernetes There's a lot of tools that come with Kube that make it easier to use and most importantly: you become cloud-agnostic. We use Ansible because it's a lot simpler than Chef or Puppet and if you use Docker Compose for your deployments you can re-use them with Kubernetes later when you migrate

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Pros of Chef
Pros of Octopus Deploy
  • 110
    Dynamic and idempotent server configuration
  • 76
    Reusable components
  • 47
    Integration testing with Vagrant
  • 43
    Repeatable
  • 30
    Mock testing with Chefspec
  • 14
    Ruby
  • 8
    Can package cookbooks to guarantee repeatability
  • 7
    Works with AWS
  • 3
    Has marketplace where you get readymade cookbooks
  • 3
    Matured product with good community support
  • 2
    Less declarative more procedural
  • 2
    Open source configuration mgmt made easy(ish)
  • 30
    Powerful
  • 25
    Simplicity
  • 20
    Easy to learn
  • 17
    .Net oriented
  • 14
    Easy to manage releases and rollback
  • 8
    Allows multitenancy
  • 4
    Nice interface

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Cons of Chef
Cons of Octopus Deploy
    Be the first to leave a con
    • 4
      Poor UI
    • 2
      Config & variables not versioned (e.g. in git)
    • 2
      Management of Config

    Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

    What is Chef?

    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 Octopus Deploy?

    Octopus Deploy helps teams to manage releases, automate deployments, and operate applications with automated runbooks. It's free for small teams.

    Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

    What companies use Chef?
    What companies use Octopus Deploy?
    Manage your open source components, licenses, and vulnerabilities
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    Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions

    What tools integrate with Chef?
    What tools integrate with Octopus Deploy?

    Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions

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    What are some alternatives to Chef and Octopus Deploy?
    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.
    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.
    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.
    Jenkins
    In a nutshell Jenkins CI is the leading open-source continuous integration server. Built with Java, it provides over 300 plugins to support building and testing virtually any project.
    JavaScript
    JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.
    See all alternatives