Likelihood to Recommend Progress Software Corporation
Chef is a fantastic tool for automating software deployments that aren't able to be containerized. It's more developer-oriented than its other competitors and thus allows you to do more with it. The Chef Infra Server software is rock-solid and has been extremely stable in our experience. I would definitely recommend its use if you're looking for an automation framework. And it also offers InSpec which is a very good tool for testing your infrastructure to ensure it deployed as intended.
Read full review In our specific use case, SUSE Manager is extremely useful. We're having a large landscape that is divided into intake, development, quality and production with a couple of different SUSE flavours that need to be automatically rolled out, configured, patched and maintained, everything from up to date repositories that are cloned on a daily basis straight from SUSE.
Read full review Pros Progress Software Corporation
Chef is great at deploying code to both small and large groups of servers. We use chef to standup new servers as well as deploy updated code to existing servers and it does this very well. Being able to make a change and have it push manually or automatically to any subset of servers has changed the landscape of how our IT teams operate. Read full review Manages patch levels for most Linux OS by: date, group, cloud or custom channels Uses a lite version of Salt to run commands or scripts on any numbers of servers at once. Allows the joining of groups inside SUSE Manager to quickly access or work with servers so grouped. Read full review Cons Progress Software Corporation
Chef could do a better job with integration with other DevOps tools. Our company relies on Jenkins and Ansible, which took some development and convincing for plug-ins to be created/available. It would be nice if kitchen didn't only have a vagrant/virtual-box prerequisite. Our company one day stop allowing virtual-box to run without special privileges, and that caused a lot of issues for people trying to do kitchen tests. Chef could use more practice materials for the advanced certification badges. There was not a lot of guidance in what to study or examples of certain topics. Read full review The cloning of patches when using the content lifecycle module in a multi-environment landscape with many SLES flavours is a bit cumbersome. More premade saltstate for default applications are always nice to have. Upgrading SUMA could be easier, especially when a Postgres upgrade is also required. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Progress Software Corporation
I am expanding the use of SUSE Manager throughout our organization and can't imagine going back to the "wild wild west" we had before.
Read full review Usability Progress Software Corporation
The suite of tools is very powerful. The ability to create custom modules allows for unlimited potential for managing all aspects of a system. However, there is pretty significant learning curve with the toolset. It currently takes approx 3-4 months for new engineers to feel comfortable with our implementation
Read full review Performance Progress Software Corporation
It loads quick enough for basically all our systems. Because we have this for local dev environments, speed isn't really a big issue here. Yes, depending on the system, sometimes it does take a relatively long time, but it's not an issue for me. One thing that is annoying is that if I want to make a small change to a cookbook and re-run the Chef client, I can't just make the change in the cache and run it. I have to do the whole process of updating the server.
Read full review Support Rating Progress Software Corporation
Support for Chef is easily available for fee or through the open source community as most the issues you will face will have been addressed through the Chef developer community forums. The documentation for Chef is moderate to great and easily readable.
Read full review SUSE Manager provided a top-tier support person on site to us for two days to help integration. We did all the standard stuff they help with before he arrived. We were able to use him to get all the tricky stuff identified and solved in the short time we had. Had they sent us a lower-tier guy, it would have been a waste. I was impressed they sent such knowledgeable person.
Arthur Hamm Senior Systems Administrator / Analyst Infrastructure III
Read full review Alternatives Considered Progress Software Corporation
We considered the three leading competitors in the field: Chef, Puppet and
Ansible .
Ansible is a very strong competitor and has a nice degree of flexibility in that it does not require a client install. Instead the configuration is delivered by SSH which is very simple. Puppet seems like it has fallen off the pace of the competition and lacked the strong community offered by Chef. We chose Chef because of the strong support by the company and the dynamic and deep community support.
Read full review The other competitors also have a good platform and service, but we went with SUSE due to cost. The price was best and we needed to keep under a certain budget. The functionality was perfect for what we needed so we took the step forward. This allows us to manage our Linux environment within the manager and update or deploy specific tasks to each as needed.
Read full review Contract Terms and Pricing Model Progress Software Corporation
The pricing seemed inline with our products in this space. Nothing out of the ordinary in contract, term, or pricing structure
Read full review Professional Services Progress Software Corporation
The entire professional services team was great to work with. The curriculum was tailored to our specific use cases. The group we worked with were very responsive, listened to our feedback, was very easy to schedule and accommodate. I cannot say enough good things about our professional services experience
Read full review Return on Investment Progress Software Corporation
Chef is a good tool for baselining servers. It will be a good ROI when there are huge number of servers. For less number of servers maintaining a master will be an over head. One good ROI will be that the Operations Team also gets into agile and DevOps methodologies. Operational teams can start writing scripts/automations to keep their infra more stable and their application stack more reliable. Implementation of Chef eliminates the manual mode of doing things and everyone aligns to automation mind set. It helps in change of culture. Read full review Manages patch levels for most Linux OS by: date, group, cloud or custom channels Make it easy to audit our own infrastructure. Allows the joining of groups inside SUSE Manager to quickly access or work with servers so grouped. 24/7 support team. Automatic deployment. Read full review ScreenShots