Hacker News Reader

Comment by devops99 | Hacker News Reader

People still use Puppet? All I ever see out there is Ansible, and some Salt.

Still use. I have experience with both and enjoy Puppet more. Ansible's YAML make it too labor intensive for me. I don't mind YAML for puppet hiera data but as a (domain specific) programming language YAML is inconvenient at best. Loops/conditions/dependencies are much easier to express in puppet DSL and even trivial things like write a config and restart a service (if needed) for me easier to write in puppet.

I feel you on the YAML, the configurations I have in Neovim that I load (as a separate config from my default) just for contending with YAML are a bit gnarly. And, the linting tools for YAML, or the particular dialect of a specific thing in YAML are not uniform at all.

Some tell me that Ansible is supposed to be better, I still prefer doing these things in Salt, in the yet rarer and rarer occasion something is not being run in some form or another of "distroless" container.

Puppet and Chef are still broadly used, but much less so in younger companies, and they're Boring Technology now -- so they'll be underrepresented in the kind of companies that HN likes, that give conference talks, and so on.

Overall I think the declarative nature of Puppet and Chef lend themselves more to still automated, but longer-lived, nodes. Not quite pets, but things that stick around for more than one deploy.

> Puppet and Chef are still broadly used

Damn, that's fucking crazy, and also really depressing at the same time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com