Chef and Puppet recommendations
I'd like to ask about when and in what circumstances you'd use puppet and when you'd use chef. I've also found rump which is a puppet-solo type of thing where you iterate a single server to its configuration and then push that to a series of servers, allowing you to see changes directly.
My question: which of the above should I use and in what ways? Could someone help me?
My aim is in the context of continuous integration, continuous deployment in a mono/.Net environment with rake and git. I would like to package, version and deploy web applications easily and would like to use recepies for a load balancer for multiple web servers. Being able to take these down quickly and not have any downtime in between upgrades.
Answer
Having used both, I would say that it depends on what you look for. In my opinion:
Chef is more developer-oriented. If you're a Ruby guru, you'll love it.
Puppet is more sysadmin-oriented. It has a non-ruby DSL so it's more difficult to propagate mistakes to your machines (imho).
Puppet creates more readable and stable code but it's also slow to deploy new features. That's probably what you'll want in a big enterprise structure which strongly believes in your DevOps work.
With Chef you can achieve complex tasks with less code, time effort. You can use all the ruby magic without having to create a Puppet construct. This is good, for instance, when your Company doesn't truly believes in DevOps value and you're constantly struggling against time to prove your manager wrong :-) I personally find Puppet a bit slower to execute when you develop new features, which can be a bit of a pain.
My suggestion is: if you're a sysadmin with some development skills, go for Puppet. If you're good with Ruby (or Python), go for Chef.
I also tried rump and I'm playing with it. It helps, it's cool, but I still don't see a huge value except lazy typing of rump go instead of puppet apply -vd --modulepath=. module/manifests/init.pp. :)