Came across this link with an interview of Lance Albertson of Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab talking about how they are managing their data center. Among the topics was a description of their reasons for switching from CFengine to Puppet. Here is what Lance had to say:

“OSUOSL uses Cfengine for systems management but hopes to migrate onto Puppet. What are the primary advantages of Puppet?

Albertson: For one, Puppet has a real community behind it instead of a single person who gets to decide what to include for patches. Additionally, Puppet’s primary goal is managing a large installation of servers instead of being a research project at a university (which Cfengine is). Also the primary contributors of Puppet just moved to Portland and have offered help to us if we switch, so that is an advantage.

From a technical point of view, Puppet offers more flexibility and an ability to actually use real code to deal with tasks. Cfengine has its own syntax language, but it’s not really suited for complex tasks. Puppet also offers some inheritance in its rules, so we could write a module that just does Apache configuration and have a host inherit that code. Then we can offer our module to the world without worrying about revealing security issues.”

Glad to see a good example of the strength of the Puppet community being a key factor in the decision companies make in their choice of tools. Thanks to R.I. Pienaar (@ripienaar) for the pointer to this article.