When comparing Puppet vs RUDDER, the Slant community recommends RUDDER for most people. In the question“What are the best configuration management tools?” RUDDER is ranked 3rd while Puppet is ranked 4th. The most important reason people chose RUDDER is:
Rudder checks every rule that has been set up to keep it compliant over time. It is a tool made to be used in production. It's not a dev tool where there is no continuity constraint.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Declarative sematic
You define the state the server should be in and Puppet transforms it that state. This is opposed to explicitly declaring a list of actions to be performed.
If a developer wants more flexibility and control there's always the option of falling back to explicitly running commands but that's discouraged.
Pro Broad cross-platform support
Puppet is supported on a wide range of operating systems. See the Docs for a complete list.
Pro Large helpful community
Puppet is very mature and relatively old. This means that it has gathered quite a following over the years. This large community means that there are a lot of modules, guides and configuration recipes ready to use built by the community.
Pro Complete
Puppet is a complete solution in terms of available features and modules. It has full support for all the main Operating Systems and provides lots of tools for its users.
Pro Exceptional enterprise support
Puppet Enterprise is used by 75 of the fortune 100 companies.
Pro All-in-one Package since version 4
With Facter, Collective and Hiera.
Pro Helpful UI
Puppet's UI is very useful. It allows real-time control of managed nodes by using modules and configuration recipes that are on the master servers. Although the UI is great for management, it lacks when trying to configure modules.
Pro Easy to learn
Puppet is model-driven and easier for diverse teams (that may include non-devs) to learn than it's main competitor, Chef.
Pro Can enforce policy even without a connection to the puppet master
With cached catalogs, puppet agents can continue to enforce policy even while your masters aren't functional
Pro Continuous configuration - dedicated to production
Rudder checks every rule that has been set up to keep it compliant over time. It is a tool made to be used in production. It's not a dev tool where there is no continuity constraint.
Pro Web UI + CLI + API
There is 3 ways to use Rudder. The biggest surprise is that everything that can be done with code is also possible with the web interface, without knowing anything about development or automation, generally speaking.
Pro Light agent developed in C - up to 10 000 nodes
The agent has nearly no impact concerning resources and that is the reason why Rudder is able to manage thousands of servers without any performance issues.
Pro Codeless user interface with built-in template library and editor
Non-expert users can define parameters in a central interface, and Rudder will automatically make sure that IT services are installed, configured, running and in good health. All actions (checks, warnings, fixed errors…) are reported upon immediately in the user interface, keeping drift from nominal behaviour low.
Pro Free and open source
Apart the agent on proprietary OS (AIX, Windows, ...) , Rudder is an open source and free software. This means that the code source is available on Github for every part of Rudder (Rudder webapp, and every other Normation repository). This also means that packages for a wide range of distributions are released and available to download freely.
Pro Running on Linux, Windows, AIX, Solaris, Android...
Rudder can manage quite everything. So far only HP-UX and iOS don't have their own agent version, but everything else is available already.
Cons
Con Poor training materials
The puppet documentation does not contain any proper tutorials to help new users on board easily.
Con Interaction between modules can get quite complex very fast
Due to it's out of order execution you can easily get into race condition between different modules. You have to be very careful declaring pre-requisites for the tasks so they don't step on top of each other. On the other hand when you get this lets you deploy things much faster than straight line execution tools
Con Lacks flexibility
The lack of control over Puppet's model-driven approach can result in less flexibility and power from the tool.
Con Solid knowledge of Ruby is needed to create your own modules
Modules and configurations are written in a specific language based on Ruby or in Ruby itself. So in order to be able to create custom configuration and modules you need a solid knowledge of Ruby.
Although it's fair to mention that there are many modules already available for every use-case.
Con Requires culture shifts
You might find difficulty adopting puppet due to the effort involved in convincing admins to switch from procedural automation to desired state automation.
Con Does not enforce policy when the puppetmaster is offline
Does not enforce policy when the puppetmaster is offline, does have a caching mechanism but since it does not include any files that need to be transfer it basically does not work
Con Slow as hell
Compared with other CM tools it's very slow and needs to do a lot of caching to give it the impression that it's fast (which it's not)
Con Syntax is a mess
To use puppet to the full extent you need to know the following tools; most of them are an integral part of puppet, Ruby, Ruby templates, puppet DSL, Hiera, Facter and Mcollective which all have a different syntax
Con Community growing but not very big at this day
There is more and more people getting involved in the Rudder community, but it's nothing compared to Puppet community so far.
Con Not a one-shot deployment tool
Rudder is overkill if the goal is only to push one-time actions. Thankully, a plugin is available to connect Rudder with Ansible and enhance its capability.