Well, if you're using Chef and just using pre-existing cookbooks I'd say you take away 90% of the power of a CM system. So yeah, probably using Chef you have to know Ruby, full-stop.
For admins whom have a history with Ruby that's not a huge request, but at the same time I question how useful it is to basically require an admin to code in a particular language to build system configurations (And that is the one thing that drew me to Puppet... that while it had a 'language' it wasn't REALLY a language, more a template syntax).
I can certain agree with the idea of using Chef as an opportunity to learn Ruby and when the day comes I have some spare time to start then it might be a good place to begin using it.
Really though beyond the language aspect, I was wondering what the feature-set that Chef offered over Puppet, things like structural decisions like how nodes are managed, node removal (kind of a sore spot in Puppet right now), etc.
I don't know enough about Puppet to compare them, but the impression I got from reading several comparisons a year or two ago was that Puppet had a more mature community and hence better cookbooks, while Chef was better suited to "dynamic" responses, like adding nodes in response to high load. So perhaps Chef has better removal abilities.
Well, the community for Puppet is good, but oddly there are many modules (what Puppet calls a 'cookbook') missing for some relatively trivial things. For instance, I have written about 10 modules now for various system utilities/resources/services now which didn't exist as of yet, or at least were very... ahem... not good. For example, I've basically re-written my own nginx module because the ability to add reverse-proxy caching to server entries didn't exist even in the Puppet Labs nginx module (really, this is a thing)!
For admins whom have a history with Ruby that's not a huge request, but at the same time I question how useful it is to basically require an admin to code in a particular language to build system configurations (And that is the one thing that drew me to Puppet... that while it had a 'language' it wasn't REALLY a language, more a template syntax).
I can certain agree with the idea of using Chef as an opportunity to learn Ruby and when the day comes I have some spare time to start then it might be a good place to begin using it.
Really though beyond the language aspect, I was wondering what the feature-set that Chef offered over Puppet, things like structural decisions like how nodes are managed, node removal (kind of a sore spot in Puppet right now), etc.