Hi all,
http://www.infoworld.com/d/data-center/review-puppet-vs-chef-vs-ansible-vs-salt-231308
I came away feeling sick in my stomach. This was written by a tech writer and I just simply think that he does not know what he wrote about.
By the way, Ansible rocks.
Cheers.
Heh, yeah, I guess I’ve been on the internet enough to not care anymore.
I thought it was a little odd in the comparison matrix especially, where it says one thing has a push mode as a plus, and everything has (effectively) some kind of push mode of some form, most notably Ansible which has the best one :). Then it talks about the language from some of the tools, and incorrectly classifies one as a data format, neglects saying the same about Ansible (where it is actually a data format), and there’s no mention of security track records of any projects – which is a glaring oversight.
When discussing WebUI, it mentions things that are found in the WebUI of at least products in the column of one as a “plus”. So, yeah, goofy and hastily done 
Any comparison of scalability is basically FUD at this point on any of these projects, with some users already using us at levels of 10k or 20k nodes – as we indicate in our scaling whitepaper, the most important thing to figure out when figuring how something scales is your update bandwidth and how you are moving data around – the config management is not going to be where you are waiting or where you are going to set things on fire, the respective amounts of data being moved are ridiculously small and our SSH is quite tuned at this point.
I suspect most users are still going to engage in critical analysis of their own, and what we always say still applies – try everything, find what you like the most. You’re going to be using it a lot – and pick something you are comfortable with from a security and management approach and if you are comfortable with the direction it is going. Use things first hand. Talk to colleagues.
There’s room enough for lots of tools in this space, and reducing things to a numeric score is a rather dated approach, especially when you include Windows in the mix and you’re just a Linux user – though we’ll have a Windows solution in the future, we believe in making Linux/Unix more awesome first and believe that would be irresponsbile to our core users to just “check a box” and say we have something – we want to take time to do it right. Ratings on such would be analogous to down-rating an Engineering school based on the quality of it’s football team’s current season (sorry beloved Wolfpack! You’ll be better next year!).
InfoWorld did not, FWIW, publish my comment on the article, which I was disappointed in.
On the plus side, it’s still free press, and some people might not have known about us before.
I’m not worried – people with critical thinking skills will still try everything and find what works for them.
And if people try us and don’t like us, email me personally, I’d be interested in their feedback.