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Chef vs Runcloud: 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; Runcloud: PHP web application & server management panel. SaaS based PHP cloud server control panel. Support Digital Ocean, Linode, AWS, Vultr, Azure and other custom VPS. GIT deployment webhook and easiest control panel to manage Laravel, Cake, Symphony or WordPress.
Chef and Runcloud can be primarily classified as "Server Configuration and Automation" tools.
Chef is an open source tool with 5.85K 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