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+---
+layout: post
+category: devops
+title: Where we talk about ansible and chef
+---
+
+I've been using Chef for some time now, but it was always via Vagrant,
+so a few weeks ago I decided to get more familiar with it.  Since a
+friend of mine set up a Chef server for his own use and was OK to let
+me use it for my own server, I put to profit the Thanksgiving weekend
+to reinstall my Linode server with it.
+
+I'm not going to talk about installation, configuration, set up and
+all that kind of stuff, there's enough blog posts, articles and books
+about that subject.  Instead, I will focus on my experience and share
+my (very valuable) opinion (because, clearly, the world deserve to
+know what I think).
+
+## Writing cookbooks for Chef
+
+For the few of you who don't know, cookbooks, in Chef's world, are a
+group of files (templates, static files) and code to change the state
+of your machine.
+
+I've a few services on my server: git, gitolite, Jenkins, graphite,
+collectd and phabricator, and I wanted a coobook for all of them.
+I've started by looking for some cookbooks on the web and try to use
+them without any modification.  Usually, I would fetch them as a
+submodule in my cookbooks repository.  But for all of them, I had to
+give up and import them in the repo, so I could modify them.
+
+That's probably my biggest concern with cookbooks: I doubt code
+re-usability is possible.  Cookbooks should just provides LWRP
+(Lightweight Resources and Providers), that's the only thing that I
+can see as really re-usable.
+
+Another annoying thing, I've not found a way to run the chef-client
+with only one specific cookbook (well, I was able to, by commenting
+all the cookbooks except one in my role, but that's gross).
+
+## Using Ansible
+
+ansible was a new tool for me.  A few friends mentionned it to me last
+October when I was at OSDC.fr and it was also suggested to me by a
+colleague at work.
+
+~~~~~~ description of what ansible is
+It's probably less known that Chef.  
+
+~~~~~~REWORK THAT PART
+With ansible you write playbooks don't write code, you only write a description in
+YAML.  They don't encourage to share your entire playbooks, but
+instead they incite you to write modules (in Python). (you can see modules as being
+similar to LWRP in Chef's world).
+
+## Chef vs Ansible
+
+I've decided to stick to this: use Chef for my supporting application
+(nginx, MySQL, etc) and ansible for my applications.
+
+So far, I prefer ansible to Chef.  There's definitely less available
+material about ansible on the net, but the quality is better, and it's
+usually well organized.  I've never spend more than 10 minutes looking
+for something and to implement it.  It can't say the same with Chef:
+the wiki is confusing, there's way too many cookbooks available, their
+quality is very disparate, etc.
+
+