[AaronBBrown]

in what way is Chef over-engineered?

[omni]

Allow me to refer you to my favorite bit of Chef documentation https://docs.chef.io/attributes.html#attribute-precedence

[omni]

Also the Chef server is more complex and written in more languages than the stack of an entire early-stage startup https://docs.chef.io/chef_server.html

And the server uses its own versioning, because what I really need is something competing with my DVCS

Too many things to count, really

[davexunit]

Here's one select example: https://docs.chef.io/attributes.html#attribute-precedence

There's plenty of this stuff all over.

[AaronBBrown]

In what way is attribute precedence over-engineered? You can ignore most of it for most cases and just use default for everything, but when you need it, it's there for you. I don't see how it's more or less simple than what Ansible has defined: http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/playbooks_variables.html#var.... I count 16 precedence rules in Ansible 2.0.

Every time a new configuration management utility comes out, everyone loves it because of it's simplicity or some arbitrary measure of "lightweight," but once Systems Engineers need to solve real automation problems in the real world, they start adopting features to work around the illusion of being "lightweight."

I like Ansible for automating my home network where I have simple problems and no need for environment separation. For professional work, I stick with Chef or Puppet.

[fletchowns]

I don't think that's a very good example. Attribute precedence is easy to understand, and it's very necessary. After working with it for a bit it becomes very intuitive.