Chef or Puppet for Volatile VM's [closed]

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There have been numerous discussions around using Chef or Puppet for Infrastructure management.

Much of the discussion focuses on feature set and comparison of the two organisations.

My question is more 'war story' focused.

We are currently investigating the two tools and whilst we of course want to make use of them for our production environments we are also interested in their use for setting up developer environments at the drop of a hat.

We envisage a scenario in which developers can spin up VM machines that act as temporary database servers with subsets of live data. Developers perform their testing once complete rip down their VM's.

Does this scenario work with such tools? Can anyone share their experiences of working in this way?

Answer 1

There is really very little to choose between the two tools. They have the same origins, in fact opscode reportedly originally started with puppet.

Checkout using vagrant to spin up development environments. It supports both Puppet and Chef and might assist in evaluating both tools.

Aside:

• I initially learned puppet first and switched to chef later (My work chose the latter tool). My experience was that puppet was easier to pick up, however chef has proven to be extremely powerful once the initial learning curve has been overcome.