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It seems like Microsoft is preferring Chef over Puppet? There seems to be more "buzz" around Chef and Azure than Puppet. https://docs.getchef.com/plugin_knife_azure.html
https://www.getchef.com/solutions/azure/

If the question's unclear, here it is.

How much benefit does running Chef over Puppet is on Azure? I don't mean "conceptual" "grand over view" type of advantages. I am hoping to hear from people who has their hand dirty and can talk about specific scenarios like "oh if only I were using Puppet, this would've been easier" or "thank god I'm on Chef or this would've been difficult on Puppet".

So, e.g. I mostly deal with AWS, and for me, with OpsWorks I can point directly at a chef recipe and run it. That's not possible with puppet without having to actually deal with puppet client installation. Comes in handy as a consultant who sometimes work for clients that do not want/need the whole shebang.

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  • Not flagging, but please note that opinion based questions are problematic on StackExchange sites. Nov 8, 2014 at 19:02

2 Answers 2

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According to Microsoft's technet blog, both Puppet and Chef are supported for managing Azure instances.

I cannot comment on the advantages that either solution, besides my general conviction that Puppet is a great tool.

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Far and away the most compelling reason to adopt Chef for managing policy for Azure nodes is that it is the recommended/approved solution by the vendor. This means you will have an easier time getting help and support. This means that if things change (and they will always change), you are more likely to get a complete solution, rather than pointers in the right direction. This may even mean that the Microsoft Azure team offers resources for doing Chef right.

That said, another advantage is the tie-in between Powershell DSC and Chef. This makes it even easier to create recipes to manage Windows resources in Azure.

This does not mean that I like Chef; my experience is that it focuses more on how to do rather than desired final state, and requires a certain consideration of order of application. I may be completely incorrect; I played with Chef once, and got turned off of it.

I would recommend to speak with Azure support, and ask what support resources are available for Chef, Puppet, SCCM, etc. Find out what help you can get with each tool. They may offer enough help to make Chef much less onerous in their environment (such as a CQ/Ci/CD workflow, sample recipes, support engineers who are conversant in Chef, consultants who can help you write and debug recipes for a low fee, etc).

Please let us know what you come up with.

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  • "recommended/approved solution by the vendor" yes. I'm not interested in being "adventurous". If they recommend something, I follow. Unless there's something seriously wrong. DSC is well, as the name says "desired state" tho. If Azure officially endorse (which I actually haven't seen anywhere yet, despite all the buz) Chef, maybe using DSC will make it more "declarative"? Oct 27, 2014 at 4:37
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    If there is not an official policy thus far, I would say to ask support, and balance that against your organization's policies and standards. Having separate CM tools for on-prem/AWS/whatever versus Azure can be costlier to rationalize, rectify and support that using the wrong tool for Azure but staying consistent to your corporate standard. I have just started playing with DSC, and it looks pretty awesome. One annoying part is setting up the infrastructure to distribute the policies, and I understand that Chef makes that all go away.
    – DTK
    Oct 27, 2014 at 4:39
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    Where have you seen that Chef is the recommended/approved solution by Microsoft? That's news to me, as someone who works at Puppet, particularly on Windows support. I'll have a longer answer later, but just so you know - Puppet, and our CEO, were both onstage during the //Build conference a few months ago. We're the only configuration management vendor with pre-baked images in the Azure Gallery (making it easy to get started with a Puppet Master on Linux). Oct 28, 2014 at 15:02
  • @EthanJ.Brown, I apologize for spreading my misunderstanding. I am excited about the prospect of managing on-demand resources with Puppet,
    – DTK
    Oct 29, 2014 at 0:07
  • Apparently both are now supported but the Chef bit was news to me as well. Nov 8, 2014 at 19:11

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