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…
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Rackspace OpenStack
Score 9.7 out of 10
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Rackspace delivers OpenStack private clouds as-a-service, architected like a public cloud and designed for scale and service availability to any data center in the world. It includes a 99.99% API Uptime SLA.
$0.12
per GB/per month
Red Hat OpenStack Platform
Score 7.5 out of 10
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Red Hat OpenStack Platform is a cloud computing platform that virtualizes resources from industry-standard hardware, organizes those resources into clouds, and manages them so users can access what they need—when they need it.
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.
Need to get an application up and running, then I would say the open stack is a great place to test it out. Why spend time setting things up when you can let them do it for you? Many people also have experience with using Rackspace in some capacity so its an easier learning curve for many people.
Best suited for - any organization where you have people who already have expertise on OpenStack, Linux & IP networking. Otherwise, the maintenance & operations will be difficult. When the number of deployed VMs reaches its capacity, it becomes very difficult to manage Red Hat OpenStack because there are no in-built fault management & performance management tools available within Red Hat OpenStack. Not suited for - Organizations where people have a culture of working on automated GUI-based tools. Here VMware wins over Red Hat OpenStack. Also where you have mission-critical applications where downtime cannot be tolerated.
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.
User management really needs improvement - when compared to AWS or GCP.
Security of the overall platform needs to be improved.
The whole architecture needs to be modular which is not. Ex - Upgrading any particular component (nova, neutron, cinder) should be possible without upgrading the whole Red Hat OpenStack version.
The creation of HEAT templates for complex applications is still a challenge & has a dependency on external tools.
Stack creation still requires parameters modification at controllers & compute because of the complex nova-scheduler algorithm.
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.
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.
I looked into going with Amazon EC2, was very comparable in pricing, services, options, etc. and a bit cheaper too. Why I did not go with Amazon mainly has to do with knowing Rackspace and being familiar with them. It was easier for me to use a Rackspace product then go with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
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.
