My talk from DevOps Cardiff on 2nd July 2014. We discussed three common Configuration Management tools, Puppet, Chef and Ansible.

1. Puppet
vs
Chef
vs
Ansible
Mark Phillips

2. About Me
• Linux tinkerer since 1992
• Automating stuff since 1993
• “Done time” in small organisations through to
Investment Banks
• I’m lazy

3. Here I talked about not wanting to do the 'heavy lifting' myself, what I wanted to do was ...

4. ... have the computers do it for me. In other words, automate stuff.

5. (no, this is all just my opinion)

6. Demo Infrastructure

7. Chef
http://youtu.be/miO00M4vPok

8. Puppet
http://youtu.be/miO00M4vPok?t=5m55s

9. Ansible
http://youtu.be/miO00M4vPok?t=8m44s

10. Points of note
• Chef is big and ugly
• Puppet is a bit better
• Both have complexity you don’t need

11. http://www.ansible.com/get-started
“I wrote Ansible because none of the existing
tools fit my brain. I wanted a tool that I could
not use for 6 months, come back later, and still
remember how it worked.”
!
Michael DeHaan!
Ansible project founder

12. Quote from a wise man

13. The Times newspaper, on a Saturday, has an article titled "What I've
learnt". The previous quote was from an interview with Matt LeBlanc

14. https://www.vitsoe.com/gb/about/good-design
Good design is as little design as possible!
Less, but better – because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and
the products are not burdened with non-essentials.
Back to purity, back to simplicity

15. At the DevOps Cardiff meet I had an anecdote that preceded the next slide. I've put this extra slide in
before uploading the presentation with that short anecdote.
!
A while back a mate with a startup had asked me about CM software,
and if he should use Chef. "NO!" came my emphatic answer. "Take a
look at Ansible". A few days past, then I got a text message from him.
!
Autocorrect on iPhones? You know how ducking annoying that shiv
can be? Well, sometimes it actually gets things right...

16. https://twitter.com/vntxuk/status/434823784710017025

17. Mark Phillips
mark@vntx.cc
@vntxuk
Blog: probably.co.uk
Github repo used to build the demos:
https://github.com/phips/c6vagrant/tree/pVcVa