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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
- 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
February 12, 2021
Chef - A Quality Product to Automate Your 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
- 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 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.
February 21, 2020
Yes, Chef
- 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.
February 19, 2020
Get cooking with Chef, and you won't be disappointed
- 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.
January 30, 2020
Repeatable Server Configuration and Deployment
- System Configuration Recipes.
- Configuration Management.
- The recipe language could be a little more robust.
- 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
- 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.
April 05, 2019
Chef - Cooking up Trouble
- 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
March 06, 2019
Chef - Automate Out of Problems
- 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.
November 28, 2018
Get Cookin with Chef
- 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.
- 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.
July 09, 2018
Chef for IaC and reliable deployments
- 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.
March 02, 2018
Centralized Configuration Management
- 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.
February 06, 2018
Chef @ SAP
- 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.
- Engine run time - need to speed up the time for cookbooks run, like in ZEROMQ of SALTSTACK.
March 24, 2017
Chef - Making Devops lives easier!
- 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.
August 03, 2016
Chef - Automate Server Deployment
- 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.
October 09, 2015
To Chef or not to Chef? That is the question.
- 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.