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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    AWS CloudFormation

    Score8.2 out of 10
    N/AAWS CloudFormation gives developers and systems administrators a way to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources, provisioning and updating them in a predictable fashion. Use AWS CloudFormation’s sample templates or create templates to describe the AWS resources, and any associated dependencies or runtime parameters, required to run an application. Users don’t need to figure out the order for provisioning AWS services or the subtleties of making those dependencies work.…

    $0

    Progress Chef

    Score6.5 out of 10
    N/AChef IT infrastructure automation suites were developed by Chef Software in Seattle and acquired by Progress Software in September 2020. The Chef Enterprise Automation Stack is an integrated suite of automation technologies presented as a solution for delivering change quickly, repeatedly, and securely over every application's lifecycle. The Chef Effortless Infrastructure Suit is an integrated suite of automation technologies to codify infrastructure, security, and compliance, as well as…N/A
    Pricing
    AWS CloudFormationProgress Chef
    Editions & Modules
    Free Tier - 1,000 Handler Operations per Month per Account
    $0.00
    Handler Operation
    $0.0009
    per handler operation
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    AWS CloudFormationProgress Chef
    Free Trial
    YesNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    YesNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    YesNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional DetailsThere is no additional charge for using AWS CloudFormation with resource providers in the following namespaces: AWS::*, Alexa::*, and Custom::*. In this case you pay for AWS resources (such as Amazon EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancing load balancers, etc.) created using AWS CloudFormation as if you created them manually. You only pay for what you use, as you use it; there are no minimum fees and no required upfront commitments. When you use resource providers with AWS CloudFormation outside the namespaces mentioned above, you incur charges per handler operation. Handler operations are create, update, delete, read, or list actions on a resource.
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    AWS CloudFormationProgress Chef
    Considered Both Products
    Amazon AWS
    No answer on this topic
    Progress Software
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    7 Answers
    100%
    Would buy again
    6 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    7 Answers
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    6 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    86%
    Happy with the feature set
    6 Answers
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    6 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    86%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    6 Answers
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    6 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    7 Answers
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    6 Answers
    Best Alternatives
    AWS CloudFormationProgress Chef
    Small Businesses
    HashiCorp Vagrant
    Score9 out of 10
    Salt
    Score6.2 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    IBM Terraform
    Score8.7 out of 10
    Perforce Puppet
    Score8.5 out of 10
    Enterprises
    IBM Terraform
    Score8.7 out of 10
    Salt
    Score6.2 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    AWS CloudFormationProgress Chef
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.0
    (7 ratings)
    8.9
    (18 ratings)
    Usability
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    7.3
    (1 ratings)
    Performance
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.4
    (5 ratings)
    Support Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    7.7
    (3 ratings)
    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    -
    (0 ratings)
    6.4
    (1 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.6
    (5 ratings)
    Professional Services
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    AWS CloudFormationProgress Chef
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Amazon AWS
    I still give it an 8 because it's one of those tools that just quietly does the heavy lifting for you but it can really test your patience when it breaks esp with deep nested stacks. It's perfect for projects where we need clean consistent environments every time. It's less ideal for quick experimental setups like new EC2 configs or Lambda permission tweaks.
    Incentivized
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    Progress Software
    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
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    Pros
    Amazon AWS
    • All resources can segregated based on stacks which provides greater visibility
    • A complete audit trail of what went wrong while deploying a particular resource
    • Automatically rollbacks if any service as part of CloudFormation results in an error
    • The UI tool is useful
    Incentivized
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    Progress Software
    • 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
    Read full review
    Cons
    Amazon AWS
    • 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
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    Progress Software
    • 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
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    Usability
    Amazon AWS
    It's easy enough to get a shared template & apply it. You don't even have to download-then-upload or copy-and-paste, a publicly-accessible url works.
    Diving deeper, it has enough powerful capabilities to make the life of a platform / DevOps engineer bearable.
    However, you need equally deep knowledge to troubleshoot issues, when they inevitably pop up. This is the same for all IaC technologies, as they are additional abstraction layers on top of the native API provided by the cloud providers.
    Incentivized
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    Progress Software
    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
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    Performance
    Amazon AWS
    No answers on this topic
    Progress Software
    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
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    Support Rating
    Amazon AWS
    No answers on this topic
    Progress Software
    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
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    Alternatives Considered
    Amazon AWS
    Cloning a virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is cloning a virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is a copy of the original. The new virtual machine is configured with the same virtual hardware, installed software, and other properties that were configured for the original virtual machine. For information about persistent memory and PMem storage, see the vSphere Cloning a virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is a copy of the original. The new virtual machine is configured with the same virtual hardware, installed software, and other properties that were configured for the original virtual machine. For information. Management guide.For information copy of the original. The new virtual Cloning virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is a copy of the original. The new virtual machine is configured with the same virtual hardware, installed software, and other properties that were configured for the original virtual machine. For information about persistent memory and PMem storage, see the vSphere Resource Management Guide. For information is configured with the same virtual hardware, installed software, and other properties that were configured for the original virtual machine. For information about persistent memory and PMem storage, see the vSphere Resource Management Guide. For information
    Incentivized
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    Progress Software
    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
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    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    Amazon AWS
    No answers on this topic
    Progress Software
    The pricing seemed inline with our products in this space. Nothing out of the ordinary in contract, term, or pricing structure
    Incentivized
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    Professional Services
    Amazon AWS
    No answers on this topic
    Progress Software
    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
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    Return on Investment
    Amazon AWS
    • + We can standup a VPC in minutes
    • - It took a lot of inital time to set up
    • + With logging/rollback, made testing much easier.
    Incentivized
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    Progress Software
    • 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
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    ScreenShots

    AWS CloudFormation Screenshots

    Screenshot of CloudFormation - How it works overviewScreenshot of CloudFormation - High level how it worksScreenshot of CloudFormation - Template exampleScreenshot of CloudFormation - Template inputs overview