Question

Is there someone who had the experience of using all the three techs?
I found that murder is a twitter’s open source project for code deploys,
it uses BitTorrent to reach a high speed of distributing files
but puppet and chef are also used for software distribution.
can any one give a brief introduction to this three?

Answer 1

Disclaimer: I am one of the Puppet developers.

Murder is a file distribution strategy: it is really, really good at getting files (and especially large files) to a whole lot of machines really fast. It integrates with other tools, like capistrano, for actually taking action to do something beyond copy files around.

Both Puppet and Chef are, at this level, almost identical: they are both tools that take a description of how the machine should be, and then turn that into actions to make it so.

You can deploy files with them both, but they are very much classic HTTP or rsync style “copy the file to here” tools. They don’t implement any P2P data transfer optimization or anything like that at this stage.

So, they can both do way more than murder, but they are much less good at “get this file on 10,000 machines”, and much better at “make this machine the way it should be”.

You would use murder in conjunction with some other deployment strategy, and Puppet or Chef might form part of that – but neither would replace the other.