[RndTbl] Call for Personal Experiences with CFEngine and Puppet

[Robert Keizer]

Greetings Greetings,

I'm looking for personal experiences from people on this list who have 
dealt with either CFEngine or Puppet. What do you think are the pros / 
cons? Did you have a horrible experience with one? Are you a Chef junky 
instead?

A little bit of background: I've been working for a company who asked me 
to design and implement a complete infrastructure solution - internal, 
external, testing, production, etc. Things are now stable, redundant, 
and tested ( 90% anyways .. always more to do ). I won't go into too 
much detail about the system as I know just how searchable this email 
will be as soon as it hits the muug server. Suffice to say that there 
are about 10 Windows and Unix systems that I'd like to be able to manage 
a little easier.

I haven't done anything more than read documentation on the two products 
mentioned above over the last few years. As I'm trying to decide which / 
if any of these systems would be a good solution for management of a 
stable production system that _won't_ have too many major changes in the 
coming months/years, and I'd like some input.

It's worth noting that I'm a guy that decided to ( before hearing of 
these frameworks ~4 years ago ) build my own custom framework for 
managing the system ( I'd like to apply the bus principle now that I 
have some sense ) - so scripts and a steeper learning curve aren't my 
biggest concern.

Any thoughts / advice / personal experiences would be most appreciated.

All the best,
Rob Keizer