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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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February 12, 2021
Chef - A Quality Product to Automate Your Application Deployments
Chef is the more developer-oriented of the three main tools in this space. It has a steeper learning curve as a result but it allows you to do more. Puppet seems to be more geared towards automated the management of the operating system. Ansible is an excellent tool but requires you to allow SSH connectivity into all of your instances.
We considered the three leading competitors in the field: Chef, Puppet and Ansible. Ansible is a very strong competitor and has a nice degree of flexibility in that it does not require a client install. Instead the configuration is delivered by SSH which is very simple. Puppet seems like it has fallen off the pace of the competition and lacked the strong community offered by Chef. We chose Chef because of the strong support by the company and the dynamic and deep community support.
Puppet Labs and CFEngine are also open source and competes with Chef. Chef has more support from the community with templates available for large scale IT deployments. RedHat Ansible is better suited when you are already using RedHat OS and OpenShift since it comes as it comes prebuilt for it. BMC, VMware vCenter and other commercial offerings are better suited when the DevOps and IT capabilities are limited internally.
February 21, 2020
Yes, Chef
- Puppet Enterprise (formerly Puppet Data Center Automation)
Briefly looked into Puppet but ended up going with Chef because a colleague had experience with it instead. Didn't get far enough into a deployment to even really compare the two.
January 30, 2020
Repeatable Server Configuration and Deployment
We found that Chef was easy to use, and we liked the whole concept of recipes and cookbooks. We were using the concept of recipes and cookbooks for our SQL development, so Chef was a natural fit for our team members and environment. That whole paradigm is easy for everyone to understand. The language to write the recipes wasn't too difficult to master either.
- Ansible, Puppet Enterprise (formerly Puppet Data Center Automation) and Puppet Pipelines (formerly Distelli)
Chef is easy to install and manage, and the learning curve is minimal, as most of the engineers are already aware of the syntax to configure services. With flexible crating recipes and cookbooks, Chef made our jobs easier, and also it integrates well with Puppet. Overall satisfaction is very high, and we did not even consider other options.
April 05, 2019
Chef - Cooking up Trouble
Chef is something we have been using for a while, so it is the natural choice when training new engineers to maintain our systems. If I was to choose a configuration management tool now, I would pick Ansible mainly because of its agentless nature and YAML cookbook language (compared to Chef's Ruby).
March 06, 2019
Chef - Automate Out of Problems
To be honest I believe SaltStack would provide a very similar experience to Chef and would allow us to automate much of our operational tasks in the same way, however I feel that Chef is more conducive to a mixed environment of Windows and Linux servers. This is the primary reason for choosing chef.
November 28, 2018
Get Cookin with Chef
We believe Chef is a great tool for DevOp. It works really well with repository tools such as Bitbucket and artifactory. The other products we evaluated either were too pricey or did not have the support we needed for a company that was very vanilla with automation. We selected Chef before of its easy of use and how fairly quick we were able o pick up its concepts and train out team.
July 09, 2018
Chef for IaC and reliable deployments
We were evaluating Ansible as it was agent less, SSH based, simple to use and is completely based on SSH protocol. As and when the servers count increase the performance might degrade. One main disadvantage with Ansible is it is more suitable for linux based systems where SSH is possible, but doesn't work that great for Windows systems natively. In the contrast, Chef works great when the servers are huge in number and is also OS neutral.
March 02, 2018
Centralized Configuration Management
- Ansible, Puppet Data Center Automation and Docker
I really found that Chef to be much friendlier and innovative than Puppet. There is an opinion in the DevOps community that says that Chef is friendlier to programmers whereas Puppet is friendlier to system administrators. This might be true, as I do come from development background and felt right at home with Chef.
February 06, 2018
Chef @ SAP
March 24, 2017
Chef - Making Devops lives easier!
Chef was easier to setup than Puppet. It also has better Windows support and documentation. Reading through the Chef documentation gave good examples on how to configure things for Windows environments, however Puppet was a bit lacking in that regard. Puppet has better support for 'one offs' but ultimately was harder for us to setup.
August 03, 2016
Chef - Automate Server Deployment
- None
We did evaluate other solutions comparable to Chef.
October 09, 2015
To Chef or not to Chef? That is the question.
Ansible and salt stack seem to be the new cool kids on the block because they are easier to setup and manage across smaller teams. I think the use of puppet is dying down in favor for these new technologies. I would like to see chef use cases with simpler implementation.