AWS CloudFormation vs. Progress Chef

AWS CloudFormation is well suited for scenarios where all of your resources need to be provisioned on AWS but it is not suited for hybrid cloud deployments. It's very easy for someone new to learn. The level of customization offered as part of the template specifically for AWS services is great. There is also a UI tool where we can drag and drop the services we want and it generates an yaml file which is very easy to use. The visibility of stacks and its resources and one place where we can track and identify the issues in deployment is great.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• SaaS
• Paas
• Iaas
• On promises

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Error Description upon Failure Needs to be Improved.
• Slow to create, delete or update.
• Need to delete resources manually. It can ask before starting deletion whether to skip those resources or delete them.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

We didn't look into anything else as Cloudformation was "built-in" for AWS, it just kind of made sense to go with that. Terraform was something that we briefly looked into Terraform but decides to stick with Cloudformation because our task was relatively "simple". Apparently if it's a bit more complex, Terraform might be the way to go.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The pricing seemed inline with our products in this space. Nothing out of the ordinary in contract, term, or pricing structure

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• It has a positive ROI
• Less time inverted in bugs
• More stable source code

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized