I tried to compile with type1, but that flag doesn’t exist. Noe does type2 apparently. Any ideas?

Cheers!

i just got one of my uncle and looking forward to hacking with sata and ide harddrives…

I think we “keep it simpler” than you describe. The use of primitives was a design goal from the start. Puppet wanted you to abstract everything you controlled into a core resource and when what you wanted to control lacked a resource, or if the existing resource lacked a feature you needed, it leaned on you more to fix the problem in Puppet rather than giving you the tools to solve the real problem. Thus Puppet has a historical list of resources for controlling Nagios, MTAs and zfs filesystems mixed in with primitives like package and service.

For Chef, we absolutely wanted to control those things but we didn’t want to burden core Chef with all of the nuances of individual applications. Those can be built into Cookbooks using the basic DSL or full Ruby utilizing the support for reusable definitions and Lightweight Resource and Providers (LWRPs) [2], which are very similar to the primitives in Chef but can be created, shared, released and re-released quickly and easily. The use of the template resource (ERB) and leveraging our search capabilities to create configuration files dynamically is encouraged in the Chef community, while we were discouraged from doing so with Puppet.

These primitives are supported on the platforms you listed, but from my experience that isn’t an accurate “enterprise” list. Supporting the applications on top of these platforms becomes a community “cookbook” project. Opscode maintains and stewards contributions to a large number of common applications [3], but other companies and users participate in the community of open source cookbooks.

Visit our community site to check out many of these cookbooks: http://community.opscode.com/

And of course, Opscode is actively working on improving Chef both for existing users and new users. For instance our Windows support [4] and installer [5] have been very well received and this is the tip of the Windows iceberg.

[1] http://docs.puppetlabs.com/references/stable/type.html
[2] http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Lightweight+Resources+and+Providers+%28LWRP%29
[3] https://github.com/opscode/cookbooks
[4] http://www.opscode.com/blog/2011/05/24/chef-hearts-windows/
[5] http://www.opscode.com/blog/2011/12/15/chef-client-installer-for-windows/

“End to end integrated thinking” doesn’t sound very Unixy to me either: see flexibility all the way down and the rule of diversity.

The admin knows what the requirements on the ground are, in a way that developers usually don’t. When I do the final step of “end to end system integration,” it results in a system I can administer, my users can use, and my security folks can trust. That’s not a “pain point,” it’s a fulfilling job, and a result my Windows colleagues are “green with envy of.”

Its basically a set of functions for Python’s fabric library for manipulating packages, managing users, services and files. There’s a link to a presentation at the end of the readme and API docs in the repository.

But I think your underlying point is not the conventions of the CM system, but conventions of the target operating system. And I agree. There is just “too much shit” you have to do to configure things. I think this stems from the fact that operating systems, even server operating systems, were designed for persistent human interaction, not transient automation. My own feeling is that operating systems need to change entirely in the cloud so that they are stateless and stripped down thin wrappers around the actual services you want to run – and this may include radical changes such as not actually having filesystems or “file”-based configuration. There are some Linux distributions starting to do this (although I am hard pressed to actually find them now that I look…).

@Scott – cloud stuff has some overlap but I will be surprised if something in that market completely nails the problem.

@Nelson – hmm, I will give Blueprint a try, especially to see how it dits in with Puppet

@qzio – The sentiments I’ve seen are that Puppet is superior to chef. Is it worth evaluating vs these other systems?