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+I've been using [[http://www.opscode.com/chef/][Chef]] for some time
+now, but it was always via [[http://vagrantup.com][Vagrant]], so a few
+weeks ago I decided to get more familiar with it. A friend of mine had
+set up a Chef server for his own use and was OK to let me use it for my
+personal server. There was a four days weekend for Thanksgiving coming,
+so it was the perfect occasion to take a better look at it, and to
+re-install my Linode server with Chef. And since it was a really long
+weekend, I also decided to take a look at
+[[http://ansible.cc][ansible]], another tool to push stuff to your
+server.
+
+I'm not going to talk about installation, configuration, set up and all
+that kind of stuff, there's enough material available around (blog
+posts, articles, books, etc). Instead, I will talk about 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 that are used to
+automate your infrastructure. Usually, you'll create a cookbook for each
+of your application (one for nginx, one for MySQL, etc).
+
+I've a few services on my server (git, gitolite, Jenkins, graphite,
+collectd, phabricator, ...), and I wanted a coobook for each of them.
+I've started by looking for the one already existing (there's a lot of
+them on GitHub, on the
+[[https://github.com/opscode-cookbooks/][opscode's account]]), and I
+tried to use them without any modification. Usually, a cookbook will let
+you set some configuration details in your role or node to override the
+defaults it provides (like the password for MySQL, or the path where to
+put logs). So what I did was to set the interesting cookbook as a git
+submodule in my cookbook repository. Unfortunately, for almost all of
+them, I had to give up and import them in the repo, so I could edit and
+modify them.
+
+That's probably my biggest complaint with cookbooks: I doubt code
+re-usability is possible. You can use a cookbook as a base for your own
+version, but either they are too generic; or sometimes you need a
+workaround; or they do way too many things. And as a result, you need to
+edit the code to make them behave the way you want.
+
+In my opinion, developers/ops should just publish
+[[http://docs.opscode.com/essentials_cookbook_lwrp.html][LWRP]]
+(Lightweight Resources and Providers) and templates, that's the only
+thing that I can see as really re-usable (take a look at
+[[https://github.com/dagolden/perl-chef][perl-chef]], I think that this
+one is a good example).
+
+** Using ansible
+
+ansible was a new tool for me. A few friends mentionned it to me last
+October when I was at the [[http://osdc.fr][OSDC.fr]] and it was also
+suggested to me by a colleague at work.
+
+This tool is definitely less known that Chef, so I'll give a quick
+introduction. In ansible world, you write "playbooks", which are the
+orchestration language for the tool. That sounds very similar with Chef,
+but the main difference is they are not actual code, but a scenario with
+actions.
+
+On the web site of the project, there's a quote saying:
+
+#+BEGIN_QUOTE
+  You can get started in minutes.
+#+END_QUOTE
+
+and for once, that's true. I only had to read the first page of the
+documentation, and I was able to write a very simple playbook that I was
+able to evolve very quickly to do something actually useful.
+
+Another difference with Chef is that they don't incite you to share your
+playbooks, but instead to share your modules. Modules could be compared
+to Chef's LWRP. They are Python code to do something specific (like the
+[[http://ansible.cc/docs/modules.html#pip][=pip=]] module, to install
+Python package, or the
+[[http://ansible.cc/docs/modules.html#template][=template=]]'s one).
+
+** Chef vs Ansible
+
+For now, I've decided to stick to this: use Chef for my supporting
+application (nginx, MySQL, etc) and ansible for my own 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 the
+main documentation is very (I insist on the /very/) well organized. I've
+never spend more than 10 minutes looking for something and to implement
+it. I can't say the same with Chef: the wiki is confusing; there's way
+too many cookbooks available; their quality is very disparate.