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Chef vs Serverspec: 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; Serverspec: Tests for your servers configured by Puppet, Chef or anything else. With Serverspec, you can write RSpec tests for checking your servers are configured correctly Serverspec tests your servers’ actual state by executing command locally, via SSH, via WinRM, via Docker API and so on..
Chef and Serverspec belong to "Server Configuration and Automation" category of the tech stack.
Chef and Serverspec are both open source tools. Chef with 5.89K GitHub stars and 2.35K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Serverspec with 2.27K GitHub stars and 375 GitHub forks.
Airbnb, Facebook, and Slack are some of the popular companies that use Chef, whereas Serverspec is used by Groupe La Poste, HERE Technologies, and Travelex. Chef has a broader approval, being mentioned in 435 company stacks & 496 developers stacks; compared to Serverspec, which is listed in 3 company stacks and 3 developer stacks.
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 Serverspec
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What is Chef?
What is Serverspec?
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What companies use Serverspec?
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What tools integrate with Chef?
What tools integrate with Serverspec?
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