CINC Is Not Chef

Chef did not make a clean transition into the immutable world. Chef Client was great for persistent infrastructure, but the options got dicier once we started talking about pre-provisioned infrastructure like image building:

1. Chef Solo (how I last used it when attempting this), which felt intentionally hobbled. All you needed was one poorly-behaved cookbook that called `search` and the bets were off.

2. Chef Zero, which was unnecessarily complicated for being Chef Solo that wasn't intentionally hobbled, so much so that I kept using Solo for awhile after its deprecation.

3. Chef Client, against a Chef Server that was run either for your other persistent infrastructure, or just to have a place to put the cookbooks. Heaven forbid you weren't cleaning up all of those dynamically-created nodes, though...

I still think Chef's Ruby DSL is much more natural than the YAML manifests used by Ansible, and the ability to integrate at the source level with custom Ruby code is a killer feature as soon as any complexity enters the mix. But I almost certainly would not be using Chef in a greenfield deployment these days.

If you're still fighting with Chef slowness, hard to debug, complicated setup, you may want to consider Pyinfra.

It is very well thoughout and simple to design and run.

I haven't encountered any Chef code in almost ten years. For the stragglers not yet primarily on Kubernetes and Terraform, I see Ansible and some extra Terraform. Maybe I see some Salt here and there.

These are just my anecdotes, for sure, but (also anecdotal) I rarely hear of other "ops" type people using Chef, and most of the ones I know never got more than just their feet wet with Chef (the SaltStack beta was out early enough to avoid Chef).

Man I miss Chef. It was wildly good for its time with a vibrant community. Habitat was cool but tried to carve into some niches that were too ambitious. And InSpec was an incredible tool but failed to build the critical community to drive it forward. I haven't experienced anything like the Chef Community since. (AI has some of these vibes in small pockets but it's very disjointed)

Now we're stuck with what I call the "DevOps ball of mud". I gotta learn 15 different yaml formats alongside the nuances of every hyperscaler and micro cloud. Like seriously it's 2025 and we still gotta deal with stateful bullshit and a bunch of unoptimized docker containers flung all over the place. It feels like nobody has solved the application runtime stateful egg and we're all just dancing to the dark gods of Docker, Kubernetes, and Helm in hopes that our blood sacrifices make the engines go for another month.

Full Disclosure: I worked at Chef for 5 years

2013 called and wants its favorite infrastructure as code (IaC) tool back.

I misguidedly thought this was going to be about Chef in Apocalypse Now. Don't get off the boat!

It's an interesting post. I feel like people who are still doing Chef definitely know about cinc already.

Are there Chef Habitat users in the wild?

What is Chef? This website fails to answer that.

I'm dumb and can't figure out wtf this is.

I legitimately have no idea what infrastructure provisioning tool to use anymore. I normally defaulted to Saltstack Masterless and Chef via Packer.

What "simple" tool is left anymore for me to create my immutable AMIs that aren't bound by some license?