Chef 11 released

Can someone explain to me the benefits of moving to chef or puppet as opposed to say my current approach of writing deploy scripts in pythons fabric (basically ssh and file operations library)<p>I have even used Puppet but I could not get over the feeling that it is more complex than I would imagine for small end users (I have managed upto 40 servers with my libraries - it seemed quite feasible to double that. Maybe it's me but 100 servers sounds a lot and is manageable (deployment wise) with controlled scripts.

Congratulations to the Chef crew! Here's one thing I still am wondering though, being a relatively heavy Puppet user now. What are the big benefits to using Chef, or would it be mostly just admin choice here? When I was originally deciding upon a CM system I looked at Puppet, Chef and Salt and decided that Salt was too new (even though I know Python), Chef declared everything in Ruby and I had no intention of learning Ruby just to generate server configurations and then finally Puppet, which I found (personally) to be simple to use/learn and didn't require me to directly learn Ruby unless I need to extend the 'language' of Puppet.

Impossible for me to join the opscode website. Maybe HN has crashed the web server due to the number of users? :)

My overall experience with Chef isn't that great, because seems to me their team didn't response to users'issue seriously.<p>E.g. I have reported a bug [1] half year ago that the chef-server failed to start automatically when your server restart, still mark as `Unresolved` and no official answer from chef.<p>I think when your server startup script failed to work on a major distribution like Ubuntu, it should be considered as critical, right?<p>[1] <a href="http://tickets.opscode.com/browse/CHEF-3204" rel="nofollow">http://tickets.opscode.com/browse/CHEF-3204</a>

the combination of erlang backbone + ruby nodes is a wonderful way to write distributed systems. i've put in my time rolling my own when a single-node system needed to go distributed, and today i'd pay the up-front cost of integrating either erlang or a message queue as soon as i added the second node; these things invariably have to scale up more than you'd expect, and your homegrown system will almost as invariably fall over and die when you can least afford it.

Another thing I think helps to explain how beneficial a good configuration management system is, especially if you have a good deal of systems, is to think of the servers as part of a botnet, and chef as the command and control.

I started with Chef around version 10.4. It's really amazing to see how far Chef and the community have come since then. Keep up the awesome work Opscode!

I haven't try Chef yet, but it seems like it has some advantages, I should give it a try!