Vagrant is a tool designed to create and configure lightweight, reproducible, and portable development environments. It leverages a declarative configuration file which describes all software requirements, packages, operating system configuration, and users.
N/A
Progress Chef
Score 6.5 out of 10
N/A
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…
N/A
Pricing
HashiCorp Vagrant
Progress Chef
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
HashiCorp Vagrant
Progress Chef
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
—
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
HashiCorp Vagrant
Progress Chef
Considered Both Products
HashiCorp Vagrant
No answer on this topic
Progress Chef
Verified User
Engineer
Chose Progress Chef
Ansible and salt stack seem to be the new cool kids on the block because they are easier to setup and manage across smaller teams. I think the use of puppet is dying down in favor for these new technologies. I would like to see chef use cases with simpler implementation.
I would recommend this tool to a colleague looking to create a repeatably deployable local dev environment based on their staging and production environments. I would recommend this mostly for individuals or teams requiring environments with server-side software such as php, et al. There are likely less processor-heavy and smaller tools for simpler projects.
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.
Vagrant is decentralized so anyone can make a container package to get a project started. you aren't limited to wordpress, or even one style of wordpress install (you can make a sage.io wordpress environment).
Vagrant easily lets you set ports and URLs for local development.
I have yet to have a problem with Vagrant, as opposed to MAMP and DesktopServer, which both gave me SQL or other issues.
Because Vagrant is a low-level tool with many ways to configure it, there is a steep learning curve. You don't just have to learn (or install) Vagrant, but also Virtualbox, Ansible and possibly some Vagrant plugins to keep boxes up to date.
Support on Windows doesn't seem great. I'm a Mac guy, so it's been very difficult getting things to work as expected when a developer wants to work on Windows.
Perhaps I didn't configure it correctly, but the default shared folders are not the best for performance. There are also frequently weird issues regarding file permissions.
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.
I liked lando better because lando seemed extremely easy to setup compared to other VM's and it seemed faster though that project was simpler. Virtualbox I ran on windows and it has a gui and has often been slow. The vagrant boxes I used did well but had slightly more problems than lando.
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
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.
