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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.
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.
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.
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
Pros of Chef
- Dynamic and idempotent server configuration110
- Reusable components76
- Integration testing with Vagrant47
- Repeatable43
- Mock testing with Chefspec30
- Ruby14
- Can package cookbooks to guarantee repeatability8
- Works with AWS7
- Has marketplace where you get readymade cookbooks3
- Matured product with good community support3
- Less declarative more procedural2
- Open source configuration mgmt made easy(ish)2
Pros of Octopus Deploy
- Powerful30
- Simplicity25
- Easy to learn20
- .Net oriented17
- Easy to manage releases and rollback14
- Allows multitenancy8
- Nice interface4
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Cons of Chef
Cons of Octopus Deploy
- Poor UI4
- Config & variables not versioned (e.g. in git)2
- Management of Config2