Chef vs Vagrant Cloud

Overview

Chef

Stacks1.3K

Followers1.1K

Votes345

Vagrant Cloud

Stacks33

Followers47

Votes2

Chef vs Vagrant Cloud: What are the differences?

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; Vagrant Cloud: Share, discover, and create Vagrant environments. Vagrant Cloud pairs with Vagrant to enable access, insight and collaboration across teams, as well as to bring exposure to community contributions and development environments.

Chef belongs to "Server Configuration and Automation" category of the tech stack, while Vagrant Cloud can be primarily classified under "Virtual Machine Platforms & Containers".

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, Vagrant Cloud provides the following key features:

Vagrant Share: A single command to share your local Vagrant environment to anyone in the world
Box Distribution: Vagrant integration provides flexible versioning and support for private or community boxes
Discover Boxes: Start new projects faster using the right box. Find trusted and top-used community boxes

Chef is an open source tool with 5.86K GitHub stars and 2.36K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Chef's open source repository on GitHub.

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CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on Chef, Vagrant Cloud

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.

329k views329k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Chef	Vagrant 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.	Vagrant Cloud pairs with Vagrant to enable access, insight and collaboration across teams, as well as to bring exposure to community contributions and development environments.
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	Vagrant Share: A single command to share your local Vagrant environment to anyone in the world;Box Distribution: Vagrant integration provides flexible versioning and support for private or community boxes;Discover Boxes: Start new projects faster using the right box. Find trusted and top-used community boxes
Statistics
Stacks 1.3K	Stacks 33
Followers 1.1K	Followers 47
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 Well Known
Integrations
Amazon EC2 Rackspace Cloud Servers Microsoft Azure HP Cloud Compute Joyent Cloud	Vagrant VirtualBox

What are some alternatives to Chef, Vagrant Cloud?

Docker

The Docker Platform is the industry-leading container platform for continuous, high-velocity innovation, enabling organizations to seamlessly build and share any application — from legacy to what comes next — and securely run them anywhere

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.

LXD

LXD isn't a rewrite of LXC, in fact it's building on top of LXC to provide a new, better user experience. Under the hood, LXD uses LXC through liblxc and its Go binding to create and manage the containers. It's basically an alternative to LXC's tools and distribution template system with the added features that come from being controllable over the network.

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

LXC

LXC is a userspace interface for the Linux kernel containment features. Through a powerful API and simple tools, it lets Linux users easily create and manage system or application containers.

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, Vagrant Cloud provides the following key features:

Vagrant Share: A single command to share your local Vagrant environment to anyone in the world
Box Distribution: Vagrant integration provides flexible versioning and support for private or community boxes
Discover Boxes: Start new projects faster using the right box. Find trusted and top-used community boxes

Chef is an open source tool with 5.86K GitHub stars and 2.36K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Chef's open source repository on GitHub.

Chef vs Vagrant Cloud