Copado is a Native Full DevOps Solution for Salesforce from the company of the same name in Chicago, designed to support fast, error-free releases. Its value stream maps enable users to visualize a team’s delivery process, identify bottlenecks, and gather metrics and insights on time and quality. Users can automatically merge and manage Salesforce XML with dynamically created release plans and 12 types of deployment steps, including full profiles. In March 2021, Copado acquired New…
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Progress Chef
Score 6.5 out of 10
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Chef 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…
When we have a large organization and number of changes and deployments are more than we should go for Copado. As we know it is a paid managed package and the cost is high so for dealing with fewer deployments it is not preferable to buy. Copado is well suited for users who don't have much technical understanding. So those users can see the User interface select the changes that need to be deployed by selecting the metadata. From Git operation to deployment all is handled by Copado itself. Copado has reduced the efforts for creating the package.xml and direct deployments can be done within a few clicks. Another Major aspect is that it can be directly synced with Jira or Azzure board from where the user stories will be synced and actions can be performed accordingly. For small organization, Copado can be expensive and to set up and maintain we need a technical person to do so.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Flosum is a downgrade for sure and I do not recommend it. Gearset is an upgrade and my preferred solution. Gearset has simplified the deployment path and makes it very easy to move between Salesforce instances. If there are any difficulties with Gearset they also have the best customer support for any deployment tool I've tried. Overall I'd say Gearset is #1, Copado #2 and Flosum a distant #3.
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.
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
It has reduced the efforts to create package.xml manually and deploy the changes
Another positive impact is that we can track the commits to which org they have reached in an organized way and we don't need to maintain them separately
For setting Copado it take a lot of time and training is required for the complete setup which is time-consuming
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.
