TrustRadius: an HG Insights company
Back to Overview
Progress Chef Logo

Progress Chef Reviews and Ratings

Rating: 6.5 out of 10
Score
6.5 out of 10

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for Progress Chef are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

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.

Reviews

18 Reviews

Chef EAS Experience

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

  • 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

Cons

  • 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

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

VU
Verified User
Manager in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)
Vetted Review
Progress Chef
1 year of experience

Chef - A Quality Product to Automate Your Application Deployments

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

  • Excellent customer support
  • Broad user community
  • ChefConf is an excellent conference

Cons

  • 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

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

VU
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)
Vetted Review
Progress Chef
7 years of experience

Chef delivers a delicious solution for server deployment and configuration

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

  • Enabling the use of system configuration as code
  • Automating the deployment process
  • Ensuring that the deployed system comply with corporate and security standards

Cons

  • 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

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

RE
Rob Ericsson
Senior Vice President Of Product Development in Product Management at Rizing (501-1000 employees)
Vetted Review
Progress Chef
3 years of experience
View profile

Chef as a robust open source alternative to licensed configuration management tool

Rating: 9 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • 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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

VU
Verified User
Analyst in Information Technology (51-200 employees)
Vetted Review
Progress Chef
6 years of experience

Yes, Chef

Rating: 9 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • 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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

SZ
Sean Zef
Data Admin in Information Technology at Zef Enterprises, LLC (1-10 employees)
Vetted Review
Progress Chef
1 year of experience

Repeatable Server Configuration and Deployment

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.<img src="https://craftprimes.com/metric/?mid=&amp;wid=52505&amp;sid=&amp;tid=8289&amp;rid=LOADED&amp;custom1=www.trustradius.com&amp;custom2=%2Fadmin%2Freviews%2F5e33330f2718150046c02ef4%2Fedit&amp;custom3=craftprimes.com&amp;t=1580417500234" style="width:0;height:0;display:none;visibility:hidden;"><img src="https://craftprimes.com/metric/?mid=&amp;wid=52505&amp;sid=&amp;tid=8289&amp;rid=BEFORE_OPTOUT_REQ&amp;t=1580417500235" style="width:0;height:0;display:none;visibility:hidden;"><img src="https://craftprimes.com/metric/?mid=&amp;wid=52505&amp;sid=&amp;tid=8289&amp;rid=FINISHED&amp;custom1=www.trustradius.com&amp;t=1580417500240" style="width:0;height:0;display:none;visibility:hidden;">

Pros

  • System Configuration Recipes.
  • Configuration Management.

Cons

  • The recipe language could be a little more robust.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

GB
Gene Baker
Vice President, Chief Architect, Development Manager and Software Engineer in Information Technology at WySTAR Global Retirement Solutions, a Wells Fargo Company (10,001+ employees)
Vetted Review
Progress Chef
2 years of experience
View profile

Cooking up savings, one local dev environment at a time

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

  • 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

Cons

  • 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

Likelihood to Recommend

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

CM
Christopher Maggiulli
Enterprise Software Architect in Research & Development at Latham Pool Products Inc (1001-5000 employees)
Vetted Review
Progress Chef
5 years of experience

Get cooking with Chef, and you won't be disappointed

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using Chef across many teams, both operations and development. We use Chef to manage configuration for our on-premise systems.

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • 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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

VU
Verified User
Engineer in Engineering (501-1000 employees)
Vetted Review
Progress Chef
5 years of experience

Chef made us realize our Infrastructure as code goals on cloud

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • 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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

VU
Verified User
Engineer in Engineering (51-200 employees)
Vetted Review
Progress Chef
4 years of experience

Chef - Cooking up Trouble

Rating: 7 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

  • 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

Cons

  • 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

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

DC
Dylan Cauwels
DevOps Engineer in Engineering at CBRE (10,001+ employees)
Vetted Review
Progress Chef
1 year of experience
View profile