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Progress Chef

Progress Chef

Overview

What is Progress Chef?

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,…

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Chef is a versatile and powerful tool that has been widely embraced by various teams within organizations. Whether it's automating the …
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Chef EAS Experience

10 out of 10
October 05, 2022
Incentivized
We are leveraging Chef Enterprise Automation stack for its numerous benefits. Chef Habitat allows us to be more agile in our application …
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Get Cookin with Chef

9 out of 10
November 28, 2018
Incentivized
Chef is a tool that is being used as part of a DevOps enablement movement that we are implementing throughout our business unit, and …
Continue reading
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What is Progress Chef?

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…

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AWS 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…

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Product Details

What is Progress Chef?

Chef Infrastructure Management enables DevOps teams to model and deploy secure and scalable infrastructure automation across any cloud, VM, and/or physical infrastructure.


Progress Chef Video

In this video, we will show you What Chef is in 60 seconds. Chef has made infrastructure automation and system compliance easier with Chef Workstation. New resources and tooling make the Chef experience lighter, simpler, and even more powerful than before. We continue to enhan...
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Progress Chef Integrations

Progress Chef Technical Details

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Frequently Asked Questions

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 auditing and managing architectures.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, HashiCorp Terraform, and Jenkins are common alternatives for Progress Chef.

Reviewers rate Ease of integration highest, with a score of 9.6.

The most common users of Progress Chef are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Reviews and Ratings

(49)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Chef is a versatile and powerful tool that has been widely embraced by various teams within organizations. Whether it's automating the deployment of development demo systems, configuring complex and interconnected systems, or managing large clusters, Chef has proven to be an invaluable asset for many users. According to Rizing, Chef has significantly reduced deployment time while improving consistency and quality. It has also addressed the challenge of having a repeatable setup, allowing users to reliably deploy similar environments multiple times. Additionally, having standard recipes for different server types has helped achieve a more consistent deployment and improved speed to market.

Many teams, such as the DevOps team at Rizing, use Chef to automate the deployment of infrastructure related to non-production development boxes. This enables rapid project setup regardless of the application or servers involved. The Infrastructure Engineering team leverages Chef to automate server deployment, perform functions like adding servers to Active Directory and installing applications, and configure HAProxy servers. AWS environments can be quickly built using Chef, with servers becoming fully functional in as little as 30 minutes. Moreover, Chef is utilized for managing Linux machines running NoSQL databases efficiently, facilitating changes to cluster environments and seamless machine replacement.

Chef's versatility extends beyond individual teams. It serves as middleware for private managed cloud software by installing a Chef-agent on each server and running the necessary cookbooks. Development teams also benefit from Chef's framework for creating repeatable infrastructure through automated application deployments. Furthermore, Chef enables scalable growth by allowing for the automated deployment and updating of configurations across large groups of servers.

Organizations have embraced Chef as part of their DevOps enablement movement, automating server creation, configuration, compliance testing, and infrastructure maintenance. Multiple Chef servers are used both within business units and organization-wide for Infrastructure as Code IaC purposes. From provisioning dev servers to managing on-premise systems and providing a single window into the status of managed endpoints, Chef proves valuable in various operational and development contexts. It is a trusted configuration management tool that spans both cloud and on-prem infrastructure, creating AWS environments with infrastructure as code using Chef cookbooks to create and configure services.

Powerful Configuration Management: Many users have found Chef to be a powerful tool for system configuration management, allowing them to efficiently manage and control the configurations of their infrastructure. With its comprehensive features and capabilities, Chef provides users with a reliable solution for ensuring consistency across their systems.

Flexible Code-Based Configuration: The use of code-based configuration in Chef has been highly praised by users for its flexibility and customizability. This feature enables users to easily define and modify configurations using code, providing greater control over their infrastructure. Additionally, the ability to track changes in a source control repository adds an extra layer of visibility and traceability.

Excellent Windows OS Support: Users appreciate Chef's excellent support for Windows OS properties, making it an ideal choice for configuring Windows systems. This robust support ensures that administrators can effectively manage and maintain their Windows servers, simplifying tasks such as software installation, configuration updates, and server deployment.

Confusing Array of Tools: Some users have found the array of tools in Chef to be confusing, making it difficult for them to navigate and use effectively. They suggest a unified approach that would make it easier for users to understand and utilize the various tools.

Steep Learning Curve with DSL: Users have mentioned that while the domain-specific language in Chef is powerful, it comes with a learning curve. Several reviewers have expressed that it can be challenging to grasp initially, requiring time, patience, and practice to become proficient.

Managing Large Clusters Can Be Messy: Managing large clusters with Chef has been described as messy and hard to troubleshoot by some users. This is especially true when nodes within the cluster have different sources for variables, leading to confusion and potential errors during configuration management.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-18 of 18)
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October 05, 2022

Chef EAS Experience

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are leveraging Chef Enterprise Automation stack for its numerous benefits. Chef Habitat allows us to be more agile in our application deployment and reducing the installation efforts. Chef Inspec assists with auditing to ensure that the expected changes have been applied. Chef Automate provides a single window into the status of our entire managed fleet of endpoints. These products integrate very well together and make managing multiple large datacenters a lot less effort.
  • Communication. The entire staff of different service areas have been very timely in communications
  • Helpfulness. We purchased professional services and that team was great helping with our initial onboarding
  • Documentation. Documentation is often confusing and trial by error typically leads to desired results
  • Learning curve of products. There is steep learning curve for all products offered. Could be more streamlined by less emphasis on various cli tools and more ui functionality for less experienced professionals
Once the basics are understood, Chef provides a valuable tool in managing the state of systems. The integration of the various tools in the suite, while not perfect, do provide enough flexibility to cover any custom use cases. Chef seems to fit best in organizations that have experienced engineers to have some development background.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Chef is available across our enterprise and is used by certain applications. It provides a framework for our development teams to use that can create repeatable infrastructure through automated application deployments.
  • Excellent customer support
  • Broad user community
  • ChefConf is an excellent conference
  • It remains to be seen how Chef evolves after being acquired by Progress
  • The Chef technology itself for cookbook development has a not-insignificant learning curve due to how powerful it is
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.
Rob Ericsson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We used Chef to automate our deployment of development demo systems at Rizing. Previously, creating new system was a time-consuming human driven process. With Chef, we were able to automate and standardize many steps of our deployment process reducing the time required and improving the consistency and quality of the systems deployed.
  • Enabling the use of system configuration as code
  • Automating the deployment process
  • Ensuring that the deployed system comply with corporate and security standards
  • The array of tools can be confusing - a unified approach would make things easier
  • The domain specific language is powerful but has a learning curve
  • Need to use other tools to complete our deployment
Chef is a very nice tool for establishing and maintaining a consistent configuration across a range of servers. In addition, Automate allows the continued monitoring and maintenance of servers so they don't drift from established standards. Overall, it deals very well with complex systems.

Chef is slightly less applicable for a micro-services approach where the servers are replicated from a simple and known starting point.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Chef is used as one of the Configuration Management tool spanning both cloud and on-prem infrastructure for the whole organization. This makes it easy to monitor, management, and audit the various middleware and infrastructure components spanning on-prem and cloud environment.
  • Chef has templates that come pre-packaged that makes it easy to manage simple to moderate complexity infrastructure.
  • There Is enough community support from both large and small vendors to help get templates ('receipts') for various deployment scenarios.
  • Chef has breadth of support for both applications and the infrastructure, reducing the number of tools needed to manage the IT environment.
  • The management console can be improved to add more metrics for monitoring, especially for applications.
  • Chef can improve support for hybrid cloud deployments, especially spanning multiple clouds. Currently, this is done manually.
  • More templates ('recipes') for Internet-scale deployments, with a focus on monitoring and auditing for compliance.
Chef is very well suited if you already have an in-house DevOps teams that have many years of experience working on Chef or related tools. Chef also works well when you need a lot of customization of the monitoring and management tool and related dashboards due to the complexity of the underlying IT. It is less appropriate for small IT environments or where internal IT expertise is limited.
February 21, 2020

Yes, Chef

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We're using Chef to deploy around 20 Linux machines that run some form of NoSQL database. We facilitate these using Chef roles and numerous cookbooks, some written in-house, and some community - depends on what is available. It's extremely powerful when making changes to a cluster environment and testing to ensure they pass tests we've implemented. Also, it makes it super easy to replace a machine if one should happen to go down. It's a real time saver compared to manually changing them one by one.
  • Once you have a cookbook, it can be reused or altered with ease.
  • Patches or swaths of changes are easy to apply to a subset of machines.
  • Counterintuitive when thinking about it from a scripting standpoint. e.g., it's about state and idempotence instead of scripts that can have unintended consequences.
  • It can cause headaches if you think about it as a scripting replacement. Both have their place, in my opinion.
Once you get your head around what it's supposed to be for, it can save massive amounts of time and headache. Getting a working cookbook is the first time you get to see its value. For me, until that point, I thought Chef was a waste of time. It's very well suited for setting up and managing lots of servers that all need the same configuration, and allows for integration testing as well. I'd say it's not well suited the other way, like if you're only building one persistent machine. It would take more time to write a cookbook to set it up than just to set it up manually.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using Chef across many teams, both operations and development. We use Chef to manage configuration for our on-premise systems.
  • Configuration Management: Chef is an easy and efficient way to manage configurations, both during and post-deployment of your systems.
  • Visibility: Chef Automate provides great insight into your infrastructure and gathers huge amounts of data to give you insight into system configuration.
  • Integrations: Chef is working hard to provide meaningful integrations to Chef Automate that will allow it to rise to its extremely powerful potential.
  • Customer Success
  • Community: The Chef community is second to none! Chef has really done great work ensuring they have fostered a friendly, welcoming, and inclusive community for their users.
  • Ease of use: Once you get your hands around it, Chef is very easy to use. Many resources within Chef follow similar patterns so it’s relatively easy to develop basic cookbooks right from the beginning.
  • Ease of migration: Because many initial users of Chef are not necessarily comfortable “coding”, Chef gives the ability to plug scripts into resources making migrating from bash and power shell scripting extremely easy. As you get comfortable, plugging and playing Chef resources in place of once used scripts is mostly seamless.
  • Dashboards: Automate is a very powerful tool. They should allow the creation of custom dashboards by users themselves, as there are too many use cases for the data provided by Chef for a single company to try to stay on top of that.
  • Extending User Roles: Dashboards should tie into IAM roles within the platform. Let me show users what they care about without them having to know what to filter.
  • Limitations in Provided Integrations and Within Automate: Chef has provided a great integration with AWS, allowing one to scan entire accounts or ec2 instances within an account. That said, using this as a scheduled job only scans ec2 instances that exist at the time the job is set up. Continuous scanning of assets within the account through the integration appears to not be occurring, which is a real bummer. Additionally, I think it's important to get user input into how they're actually expecting to use the tool to fully understand what users need in terms of automation, especially around the compliance portion of the tool. Finally, I think it's important to ensure that key features (like scheduled scan jobs) work in the desired way or document workarounds prominently.
  • Communication with existing customers: As stated above, if something doesn't work exactly as it should, there's no shame in effectively communicating known workarounds to customers and users. We understand improvement takes pain sometimes, but if you know a way around it, throw that information out there and save others some valuable time.
Chef is extremely valuable when there is a need to manage configurations. Chef is also becoming extremely useful for one-off changes with their chef-run tooling in Chef Workstation. Habitat is becoming increasingly beneficial for the cloud/containerized immutable world. Inspec is something companies shouldn't live without. Chef appears to be working hard to ensure that no matter the use case they have the ability to help make lives easier and more automated.
Gene Baker | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Chef is not an enterprise-wide tool. We use Chef within our department for the configuration management of our numerous servers. Even though we only have a small number of different types of servers, the configuration of hundreds of servers can be unwieldy. Having a standard recipes for a database server or reporting server has helped us to have a more consistent deployment. This helps when deploying new virtual machines, and helps with our speed to market.
  • System Configuration Recipes.
  • Configuration Management.
  • The recipe language could be a little more robust.
Chef is a great tool to have when you need to have consistent server deployments as it offers the use of recipes and cookbooks. Because the recipe is used, the process is repeatable, and you can expect consistent deployment results. This helps prevent drift in the configuration deployments and that allows for standardization which helps for troubleshooting server and configuration issues. For me it is critical that if we deploy 7 reporting servers, that they are all configured the same, unless requirements call for them to be different. I prefer this, what we call the "Southwest model," being that Southwest Airlines uses one type of planes, 737s, albeit different variants. We prefer all of our Linux reporting boxes to be configured alike, all the same. It's the same with our database servers; they should all be the same unless we find a valid reason for them to differ. This is where the recipes are extremely helpful and valuable.
Christopher Maggiulli | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Chef is used in a variety of different fashions through my organization. At the highest level, it is used by our DevOps team to automate deployment of infrastructure related to non-production (Dev, Test, UAT) development boxes.
  • The best things about Chef are the Cookbooks, making implementation fast
  • Very wide adoption in the open source community
  • I love the Ruby DSL
  • Love that it's implemented in Erlang which makes it especially quick
  • It's developer-oriented, which I like, but some of our sysadmins use Chef too, and they aren't great with it. It would be nice if there was a layer of abstracting for simple jobs to reach a wider user audience
  • For somewhat of same reason, it's harder to manage than Ansible
  • The absolute biggest issue is source of truth. You can't use git as your source of truth in Chef like you can in Ansible
  • It's also hard to manage because your have to keep your Chef server and repo in sync
We run a large Liferay platform with a heavy load and high availability. We may have 6 developers working on the platform at a given time, and it takes them a week just to learn to set the environment up. With Chef, we can provision them a "local" environment with the push of a button.

In some instances we find Chef to be overkill. We have a large application landscape and some of our applications don't follow the traditional DTAP model (especially in systems that have serverless cloud components). We find the time it takes to write a cookbook for these systems may not provide a return on investment, especially if it isn't a critical system
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Chef to create our AWS environments with infrastructure as code, using Chef cookbook with recipes to create and configure services. Along with puppet, Chef made it easier to achieve IAAS for our cloud-based applications and to manage 6 different environments.
  • Easy to install and configure.
  • Ease of use.
  • You can spin up the environment in minutes.
  • Very simple syntax.
  • Easily replicated to build multiple environments.
  • Infrastructure as code goals.
  • Devops work is easier than ever.
  • It needs some initial learning curve.
  • Some Ruby knowledge is required.
  • For Infrastructure as code, you may have to disable all the services to configure any single service.
For our cloud-based applications with multiple environments and microservices, Chef made life easier with infrastructure as code. Along with using puppet, we can bring up or configure the environments in minutes. Any charges to services can be easily managed using recipes and cookbooks. It's easy to learn, with much less/no learning curve if you know Linux/ruby. It's flexible to manage multiple cookbooks for different environments, and works well with the puppet.
Dylan Cauwels | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Chef is great for getting people not currently experienced with platform tools up and running as quickly as possible. Instead of spending months trying to figure out the platform/build tools/distro technicalities, they can get right to work on projects that can be targeted at any application with any servers that are running any OS/programs.
  • Uses DSL for configuration instead of the conventional XML
  • Rackspace has extensive support for it and it integrates well into almost any cloud platform (AWS, Azure, etc.)
  • The concept of recipes is great and allows for multiple machines with different operating systems and configurations to be updated in a similar way even if they share almost nothing in common
  • Configuration management hits a critical mass where it can take almost an entire team to support it. Determine that you need to have all your machines on the same page first before you commit to using Chef in your infrastructure
  • Requiring installation on machines can be a pain compared to the agentless nature of competitors such as Ansible
  • Ruby as a configuration language can take a while for an unfamiliar engineer to learn and often negates the benefits of configuration management in the first place with the amount of time it takes up
Chef is great for managing large amounts of servers and ensuring that your applications run the same on all of them. While it may take a bit to learn Chef, the time saved is incredible at the end of it. However, if you are just getting into configuration management tools I would recommend looking into Ansible as it has a few key tradeoffs with Chef that can be substantial resource savers.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our organization uses Chef to deploy new code in an automated fashion. We also use it to update existing configurations and push those changes in an automated fashion to large groups of servers. Having the ability to deploy simple or full system changes out to a large group of servers with little human interaction has been a game changer for our company allowing us to deploy at scale and grow our infrastructure as our company grows.
  • 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.
  • Chef can be very complex, but therein also shows the unlimited possibilities of what you can do with it.
  • I would like some better reporting on the status of a deployment from Chef, but I feel this can be obtained with other products that can be incorporated to work in conjunction with Chef.
Our organization uses Chef to deploy new code in an automated fashion and it excels in this aspect. It is also well suited to updating existing configurations and push those changes in an automated fashion to large groups of servers. Having the ability to deploy simple or full system changes out to a large group of servers with little human interaction has cut down on time lost spinning up individual servers and allowed our teams to focus on other, operational problems and made us more efficient in dealing with problems with impact customers as opposed to building servers. Chef has enabled us to deploy at scale and helped grow our infrastructure as our company grows.
November 28, 2018

Get Cookin with Chef

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Chef is a tool that is being used as part of a DevOps enablement movement that we are implementing throughout our business unit, and hopefully our organization in the future. It will help automate the manual task of creating and configuring new servers, testing existing servers for compliance regulations, as well as providing on-going maintenance for our infrastructure.
  • Chef is very easy to learn. Written in ruby, Chef code is high enough level for non-ruby coders to get a general idea of what the script is doing.
  • Chef can be a one stop shop for writing code, testing infrastructure, and deployment of applications.
  • The Chef support team is very helpful in their auto manager support as well as active support in their Slack channels from development engineers & architects.
  • 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.
Chef is really great when teams are attempting to migrate over from legacy systems. In our case, it was a switch over from AIX to Linux. Thus, it was a great opportunity to use Chef to build out deployment cookbooks that could then be used win order to set up the new servers in preparation for the upgrade.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use multiple Chef servers. We had 2 Chef servers hosted in our Business Unit, one for production and another for pre-production. We developed on that and maintained them too. Apart from these 2 we have organizational wide Chef servers which can be used by any BU and a central tools team maintains those servers. We are using Chef not only for IaC but also for deployment purposes.
  • Chef helps maintain all the servers of one logical group to be in the same state. This helps in maintaining a standard across all the servers.
  • Concepts in Chef like roles, environments and tags helps a lot in logical grouping and executing corresponding cookbooks on them to maintain the stability.
  • We use Chef not only for infrastructure as code but also for reliable deployments.
  • One main concern with Chef is the maintainability of Chef master.
  • The Chef-client should be installed on every node we want to do any automation.
  • It is mostly Ruby and there's a learning curve. Need to understand the fundamentals of Chef very throughly to play around with attributes, templates etc etc.
  • The Chef-client agent needs to be run on the nodes frequently to update the details of it state to master. And also to index the nodes based on tags.
Chef is useful for maintaining the servers in a known stable state for in-house datacenters. It helps to achieve infrastructure as code and helps in deployments as well. It is suitable for when there are a huge number of servers and you have to bring up the entire application stack in a safe and reliable way. It also helps in baselining the servers with same packages and corresponding versions.
Aiman Najjar | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Chef is a great technology for centralized configuration management. Therefore it's perfect for configuring complex, interconnected systems where parameters may be shared, or facts (e.g. ip address,..etc) about other nodes are needed to populate configuration files. Chef provides advanced capabilities such as encrypted data bags (to store configuration variables), versioning, roles, cookbooks repositories,..etc. It's very advanced and great system for managing large and complex clusters.
  • Centralized Configuration Management; Chef really excels at that as it provides a wide range of features that are well thought of, such as data bags, encrypted data bags, roles, shared repositories, cookbooks versioning, environment locking..etc
  • Chef is based on Ruby and therefore it has all the capabilities of this powerful scripting language, unlike other tools that has its own DSL. This means greater flexibility to implement really custom logic.
  • Chef community has made an impressive progress with regards to automated testing of cookbooks.
  • Chef complexity sometimes backfires when managing large clusters. Since a node can have different sources for variables, it can easily get messy and hard to troubleshoot.
Chef is great for managing complex and interconnected ecosystems. The centralized server makes it easy to gather facts from all nodes and store all parameter in centralized repository. For example, consider a scenario where your shared, main database hostname is going to change. With Chef, you can change the data bag and it will update all applications that are using this parameter.

For simpler, quick and dirty needs. Chef overhead may not always be necessary. In those cases, Chef solo can be used but I still see other tools are more appropriate for that case.
February 06, 2018

Chef @ SAP

Ofir Gutmacher | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Chef is used as a middleware for our private managed cloud software. Chef is used in an in-house utility called Arc, that installs a Chef-agent in each server that users spin up, and then run all the cookbooks that are in the run list.

The business problems [it addresses] are: tidy up servers, control the diverse apps versions, generate a catalogue of apps and configs for the company's usage.
  • Attributes in files can be changed once, instead of walking all over the recipes.
  • Ohai - generates machine parameters non-stop.
  • Databags keep some more secured information for usage with the recipes.
  • Chef, unlike Ansible, must use its own agent. Ansible just uses the "already" pre pared "SSH" utility.
  • Engine run time - need to speed up the time for cookbooks run, like in ZEROMQ of SALTSTACK.
Well, in case we have more than 10,000 servers, and configuration must be run on them, we use Chef.
Kevin Van Heusen | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Chef for building out our environments in our development organization. It solves the problem of having a repeatable setup, once the Chef scripts are defined we can reliably deploy a similar environment as many times as needed. We don't need to guess at what we used to install on windows machines.
  • Configuration by code means that we can check in the Chef setup in a source control repository and everyone can view what changes are being made.
  • Great Windows support, Chef treats Windows as a first class customer and has great support for configuring various Windows OS properties.
  • Good documentation and support from the Chef team.
  • Chef client setup is a bit complicated, would be nice to have a streamlined installer instead of requiring command line
  • Chef user interface could be improved, would be nice to have UI options for some of the setup parameters.
  • Would be nice to be able to do one off installs/run commands. We have clients already setup talking to a server, would be a good opportunity to send commands to them.
Chef is great for ensuring you have a repeatable infrastructure. Gone are the days of manually tweaking settings and then trying to remember what you did six months later. Chef enables your team to keep tabs on what's being changed due to its ability to keep its configuration and scripts inside source control. You can look at the history of what was configured and when.
Dan Lepinski | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Chef within our Infrastructure Engineering team. Each of our cookbooks is built with the purpose of automating the deployment of a server. Our end goal is to be able to simply run Chef to build out an server with no user intervention. We currently use Chef to perform functions like, but not limited to: Adding Linux and Windows servers to Active Directory, installing IIS and creating functioning sites, installing various applications, and configuring HAProxy servers. Within a minutes, we are able to run a Knife command to build a server in our AWS account, and have that server completely functional within 30 mins.
  • Server deployment. We can knife servers within 30 minutes.
  • Automates software installs.
  • If built out correctly, it takes care of all the little configuration details Admins forget when deploying a new server.
  • There is tons of documentation out there to help you accomplish just about anything with Chef.
  • Coding experience is required. The more you know, the more you'll be able to do with Chef. Chef training is recommended.
  • Sometimes your cookbooks will break due to changes in dependencies. Not Chef's fault, but a fault with the overall path. It can be difficult to track down the issues at times.
  • Chef is overwhelming at first. There's a lot of odds and ends to take in that I found you just needed to learn with time, patience, and practice.
Chef is suited for just about any situations in which you need to automate a process on a server. Once you've built out a cookbook, the chef run with take care of everything for you. Assuming nothing changes, you never have to worry about it again. The great thing about it is it's meant to automate everything so you, and your colleagues don't have to worry about it anything. You can make changes in one cookbook that can then update an entire farm of servers.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I developed chef cookbooks to initially be used with provisioning our vagrant instances so that developers could have a working copy of the dev environment on their local machines. Since then, we have used chef to provision dev servers and also with packer to build images. It is primarily used with the dev team.
  • Provides a programmatic approach to automation that makes sense for developers.
  • There seems to be issues when using a cookbook on vagrant via chef solo and on a production environment being orchestrated by rightscale. Would love it if the cookbooks worked seamlessly between the two.
Depends if your operations team has a programming background. If your operations team is not well versed in programming then it might be difficult or you are working with an outdated team. Things like puppet, ansible, or even saltstack seem to be more user friendly for older operations people. Also, the learning curve for chef can be intimidating.
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