Concise writeup from administrator at Berkeley Lab Commons on why he chose Puppet over CFEngine
I came across this link today describing a few reasons why James Welcher at Berkeley Lab Commons decided to use Puppet instead of CFEngine. He includes a link to an article from Luke Kanies as well as some good links for migrating from CFEngine to Puppet.
In his words, the reason he ultimately decided on Puppet hinged on its ability to handle more complex tasks:
Puppet seems to handle more complex tasks, at the possible expense of more complex configuration, at least initially, but it can then handle “higher-level” funtions, like package management. This will be important to us if we are doing cross-platform (Linux as well as FreeBSD) management.
Many of the people we speak with are comparing Puppet with CFEngine and ultimately looking at the advantages they can gain from a more powerful tool. In part, Puppet was developed by Luke Kanies to address many of the shortcomings of CFEngine and to provide better tools to system administrators.