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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Continuous Deployment
  4. Server Configuration And Automation
  5. Chef vs Visual Studio Code

Chef vs Visual Studio Code

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Chef
Chef
Stacks1.3K
Followers1.1K
Votes345
Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code
Stacks186.5K
Followers169.1K
Votes2.3K
GitHub Stars178.2K
Forks35.9K

Chef vs Visual Studio Code: What are the differences?

  1. Installation and Purpose: Chef is a configuration management tool used for automating infrastructure tasks, while Visual Studio Code is a code editor primarily used for writing and debugging code.
  2. Language Support: Visual Studio Code supports a wide range of programming languages with built-in features and extensions, whereas Chef utilizes a domain-specific language (DSL) based on Ruby for defining infrastructure as code.
  3. User Interface: Visual Studio Code provides a user-friendly interface with features like IntelliSense, debugging, and extensions marketplace, whereas Chef relies on the command-line interface, text editors, and web-based GUI for managing infrastructure configurations.
  4. Workflow Integration: Visual Studio Code integrates seamlessly with version control systems like Git, offering features for collaborative development, whereas Chef can integrate with version control systems but focuses more on workflow automation and infrastructure provisioning.
  5. Community and Support: Visual Studio Code has a large community of developers contributing to its extensions and providing support, while Chef has a dedicated community focusing on infrastructure automation best practices and solutions.
  6. Cost and Licensing: Visual Studio Code is free and open-source, available under the MIT License, whereas Chef offers both open-source and enterprise versions with different licensing options and pricing models.

In Summary, the key differences between Chef and Visual Studio Code lie in their purpose, language support, user interface, workflow integration, community support, and cost and licensing.

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Advice on Chef, Visual Studio Code

Kamaleshwar
Kamaleshwar

Software Engineer at Dibiz Pte. Ltd.

Jul 8, 2020

Decided

Visual Studio Code became famous over the past 3+ years I believe. The clean UI, easy to use UX and the plethora of integrations made it a very easy decision for us. Our gripe with Sublime was probably only the UX side. VSCode has not failed us till now, and still is able to support our development env without any significant effort.

Goland being paid, as well as built only for Go seemed like a significant limitation to not consider it.

1.36M views1.36M
Comments
Samriddhi
Samriddhi

Machine Learning Engineer at Chefling

Sep 26, 2020

Decided

Lightweight and versatile. Huge library of extensions that enable you to integrate a host of services to your development environment. VS Code's biggest strength is its library of extensions which enables it to directly compete with every single major IDE for almost all major programming languages.

1.04M views1.04M
Comments
410-Ventures
410-Ventures

Nov 18, 2020

Review

PyCharm (pro)

  • great editor designed specifically for Python and python apps
  • complex (good for configurability, bad for simplicity)
  • expensive ($200 first year, $120 third year)

PyCharm (free)

  • same as above but without a REST client or support for other web development tools (which you will likely end up using)
  • ok to get your feet wet (you can always upgrade later) Full comparison: https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/features/editions_comparison_matrix.html

VS Code (free)

  • Configurable "IDE" with support for most modern languages
  • TONS of simple-to-install extensions that add functionality
  • Great docs and UI

Sublime Text (free)

  • one of the most minimal editors out there
  • it just works

It's really down to personal preference. But I would recommend downloading all of the FREE editors, getting setup in each, and keeping only the ones you like.

My personal choice for web development is VS Code but I started with Pycharm (free), and use Sublime text on occasion.

Just focus on learning and developing and you will find what features you're looking for.

12.1k views12.1k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Chef
Chef
Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code

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.

Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.

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
Combines UI of a modern editor with code assistance and navigation; Integrated debugging experience
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
178.2K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
35.9K
Stacks
1.3K
Stacks
186.5K
Followers
1.1K
Followers
169.1K
Votes
345
Votes
2.3K
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
  • 341
    Powerful multilanguage IDE
  • 310
    Fast
  • 194
    Front-end develop out of the box
  • 158
    Support TypeScript IntelliSense
  • 142
    Very basic but free
Cons
  • 46
    Slow startup
  • 29
    Resource hog at times
  • 20
    Poor refactoring
  • 14
    Poor UI Designer
  • 11
    Weak Ui design tools
Integrations
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2
Rackspace Cloud Servers
Rackspace Cloud Servers
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure
HP Cloud Compute
HP Cloud Compute
Joyent Cloud
Joyent Cloud
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Chef, Visual Studio Code?

Sublime Text

Sublime Text

Sublime Text is available for OS X, Windows and Linux. One license is all you need to use Sublime Text on every computer you own, no matter what operating system it uses. Sublime Text uses a custom UI toolkit, optimized for speed and beauty, while taking advantage of native functionality on each platform.

Atom

Atom

At GitHub, we're building the text editor we've always wanted. A tool you can customize to do anything, but also use productively on the first day without ever touching a config file. Atom is modern, approachable, and hackable to the core. We can't wait to see what you build with it.

Vim

Vim

Vim is an advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power of the de-facto Unix editor 'Vi', with a more complete feature set. Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems. Vim is distributed free as charityware.

Ansible

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.

Notepad++

Notepad++

Notepad++ is a free (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer") source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License.

Terraform

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.

Emacs

Emacs

GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor—and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing.

Capistrano

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 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.

Brackets

Brackets

With focused visual tools and preprocessor support, it is a modern text editor that makes it easy to design in the browser.

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