Chef vs Puppet: Software Comparison

Development and operations (DevOps) software enables the automation of the software development process. In today’s software market, speed of delivery and constant evolution is of the essence. The DevOps model unites development and operations teams and helps enhance the ability of an enterprise to develop and roll out applications and services quickly.

Given the high speed of development that is enabled by DevOps, DevOps software helps teams automate tiresome, manual procedures by using a technology stack and tooling and gives engineers greater control of the management of complicated development environments at scale.

In doing so, DevOps tools help an organization serve customers efficiently and compete in the market effectively. The need for a robust DevOps tool is evident, and with the number of solutions available today, it is difficult to choose one that best matches your necessities. We have made the process of choosing a DevOps tool easier for you.

In this guide, we will cover all you should know about Chef and Puppet.

Also read: Scaling DevOps: Best Practices

What is Chef?

Chef Enterprise Automation Stack (EAS) is Chef’s full suite of enterprise infrastructure, application and development, and security and operations (DevSecOps) automation technologies for providing secure, repeated, and quick change. Chef EAS is powered by Chef Automate, Chef Habitat, Chef InSpec, Chef Infra and Chef Premium Content.  

Key Differentiators 

• Build, manage, secure, and deploy any application on any IT infrastructure.
• Automate management, deployment and infrastructure configuration across IT environments.
• Continuously enforce compliance and security standards.
• Gain actionable insights to acknowledge current state, reform issues, and confirm successful changes.
• Chef Automate is an enterprise dashboard and analytics software that enables cross-team cooperation with actionable insights for an auditable history of environment changes, compliance, and configuration.
• With Chef Habitat, you can leverage automation capabilities for outlining application build time and runtime necessities, packaging, and delivery. 
• Chef InSpec provides abilities to define, test, and enforce compliance and security standards on-premises and in the cloud.
• With Chef Infra, you can configure and remediate numerous systems across IT environments. 
• Chef Premium Content provides audit and remediation capabilities.

Pricing: You can download each open-source component of the DevOps tool for free. Open-source Chef EAS comes with limited features and support. Contact the Chef sales team to learn how much a Chef EAS license costs. 

What is Puppet?

Puppet Enterprise is a DevOps software that helps you manage and automate IT infrastructure and complex workflows in a straightforward, yet vigorous way. The tool merges task-based and model-based capacities that allow teams to seamlessly scale their multi-cloud infrastructure as the automation footprint grows.   

Key Differentiators 

• A simple, prescriptive way to construct, test, deploy, and promote infrastructure code enables DevOps teams to speed up application deployment timeframes.
• Puppet Forge enables you to reuse existing code or integrate shared content to orchestrate complicated tasks and plans for deploying applications. 
• Model-based and workflow-based automation types enable appreciable infrastructure management flexibility.
• By replacing time-consuming and error-prone steps with prebuilt patching task automation, it is easier and faster to keep hosts secure, compliant, and healthy.
• With Puppet Comply, you can automate and scale every stage of the compliance lifecycle.
• Impact Analysis helps you ascertain the effect of potential code changes.
• With self-service automation, teams outside of the central organization can simply manage their infrastructure automation. 
• With data-driven insights, you can determine automation performance.

Pricing: You can sample a full-featured trial for up to 10 nodes, free of cost. For pricing details, reach out to the Puppet sales team. 

Chef vs. Puppet

Here are the key differences between Chef and Puppet.

Choosing DevOps Tools

In today’s fast-paced software development market, employing a sturdy DevOps tool is necessary.

DevOps software automates several manual development procedures, including provisioning, application deployment, continuous delivery, orchestration, and endpoint protection, It also offers numerous benefits, such as security, improved collaboration, scalability, reliability, rapid delivery, and high speed of innovation.

Chef and Puppet are outstanding solutions in their own right and should be further studied to make a well-informed acquisition commitment. Visit the websites of the DevOps tools, explore their features in-depth, and check out customer reviews before purchasing and integrating a solution into your DevOps environment.

Read next: Best DevOps Tools & Software of 2022