The alternative is ansible. Everybody I know moved away from Chef to Ansible and never looked back.
Historically there were 4 main configuration management tools: puppet/chef/ansible/salt.
The first two faded away. They're unarguably not the most usable and require to program in ruby. The next generation ansible/salt came out and arguably did better on every aspect.
I think it's fair to say that ansible is the safe standard (redhat acquired it few years ago, they maintained and extended it pretty well). Ansible is very easy to use and to integrate in anything as long as you have SSH access.
The only downside of ansible is that it can get slow with thousands of hosts to manage (gotta establish SSH connections). Salt can do better with large amount of hosts.
Ansible doesn't necessarily need ssh or a central control node, just a place to store roles as artifacts, such as Artifactory or a storage bucket.
Pass all of your variables and dependencies (role artifact urls, python requirements.txt, etc) to machines through user data and have the machine download the dependencies and run ansible-playbook to configure itself. Optionally, add a systemd timer to run it on a schedule and you have an "agent".
I've done it this way a large percentage of the time using ansible. The other way is by baking images and using ansible as the provisioner (using ssh but only during the image build).
Some people still like promise theory and the execution model behind chef and puppet.
I don't want to orchestrate against hundreds of systems with SSH and tell them what to do. I'd rather tell them what I want, and let them sort it out locally.
IMHO opinion, another big benefit of ansible is how usable it is from the start. Granted, you can build some bad habits if you're not careful, but being able to step into ansible and use it for stuff without a big building project is a huge advantage.
> The alternative is ansible. Everybody I know moved away from Chef to Ansible and never looked back.
That has been my experience/perspective as well. This was what I found industry...
* ~2012 Puppet golden years
* ~2014 Chef golden years
* ~2016 Surge of popularity for Ansible and Salt.
* ~2018+ Kubernetes ubiquity, Terraform for cloud, Ansible for systems
Related to this, saw popularity in SSR (server-side rendering) with Rails before 2012-2016, and after 2016 rise of popularity in SPA (Angular, React, Vue) on top of micro-frameworks like Flask (Python), Express (Node), GoLang, others. Combined with this are ML and other backend infra that requires managing clusters that scale better on Kubernetes, where Chef/Puppet have little presence on either K8S or backend distributed clusters.
Historically there were 4 main configuration management tools: puppet/chef/ansible/salt.
The first two faded away. They're unarguably not the most usable and require to program in ruby. The next generation ansible/salt came out and arguably did better on every aspect.
I think it's fair to say that ansible is the safe standard (redhat acquired it few years ago, they maintained and extended it pretty well). Ansible is very easy to use and to integrate in anything as long as you have SSH access.
The only downside of ansible is that it can get slow with thousands of hosts to manage (gotta establish SSH connections). Salt can do better with large amount of hosts.