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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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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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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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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 Technical Details
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
|---|---|
| Mobile Application | No |
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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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!
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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.
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October 05, 2022
Chef EAS Experience
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.
February 12, 2021
Chef - A Quality Product to Automate Your Application Deployments
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.
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.
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.
February 21, 2020
Yes, Chef
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.
February 19, 2020
Get cooking with Chef, and you won't be disappointed
We are using Chef across many teams, both operations and development. We use Chef to manage configuration for our on-premise systems.
January 30, 2020
Repeatable Server Configuration and Deployment
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.
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.
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.
April 05, 2019
Chef - Cooking up Trouble
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.
March 06, 2019
Chef - Automate Out of Problems
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.
November 28, 2018
Get Cookin with Chef
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.
July 09, 2018
Chef for IaC and reliable deployments
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.
March 02, 2018
Centralized Configuration Management
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.
February 06, 2018
Chef @ SAP
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.
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.
March 24, 2017
Chef - Making Devops lives easier!
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.
August 03, 2016
Chef - Automate Server Deployment
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.
October 09, 2015
To Chef or not to Chef? That is the question.
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.