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Chef vs Distelli: 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 Distelli? Build, test and deploy any piece of code in minutes. Build, test, and deploy your code from GitHub and BitBucket (or no repository at all) to any server in the world regardless of provider. Distelli customers iterate and ship faster with complete transparency.
Chef can be classified as a tool in the "Server Configuration and Automation" category, while Distelli is grouped under "Deployment as a Service".
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, Distelli provides the following key features:
- Easy Setup
- Works with any Server
- Works with Teams
"Dynamic and idempotent server configuration" is the top reason why over 104 developers like Chef, while over 4 developers mention "One click management, intuitive and informative" as the leading cause for choosing Distelli.
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.
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 Distelli
- Distelli makes streamlined deployment pipelines easy5
- One click management, intuitive and informative5
- Fast and easy. plus they really care about my business4
- Decent CLI, easy UI, responsive team2
- Distelli makes it easy to build and deploy my apps2
- Easy build & deploy solution. Bring your own servers1