Progress Chef

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.