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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 have reduced our time to deploy application updates from weeks to days
- Our time to mitigate vulnerabilities has reduced from days to hours.
February 12, 2021
Chef - A Quality Product to Automate Your Application Deployments
- Chef has greatly helped out company's effort to adopt the public cloud
- Reduced our time to deploy servers to support the business
- Increased our confidence that deployed servers meet internal and external standards
- Licensing wasn't granular enough to reflect our true use of the tools
- Positive impact on the business by reducing the upfront cost to purchase Chef licenses and support through the use of an open-source version of Chef.
- Positive impact on IT spent by reducing the cost needed to maintain a large scale IT environment.
- Improved ROI from IT through better and more realtime management of the applications and the infrastructure across cloud and on-prem deployment.
February 21, 2020
Yes, Chef
- There have been many positive impacts for managing large amounts of servers with ease.
- It took a while to realize the ROI due to the initial learning curve of the software from 'traditional' approaches.
February 19, 2020
Get cooking with Chef, and you won't be disappointed
January 30, 2020
Repeatable Server Configuration and Deployment
- Less time is spent troubleshooting configuration errors.
- From the first time we see correct deployment of servers.
- Huge return when onboarding new developers. We run a lot of platforms at my company (Liferay, Hybris, Oracle SOA, RabbitMQ, ColdFusion 8, ColdFusion 11, Oracle Service Cloud, and many more). To get these local environments set up it would take a new hire months to learn all that before we used Chef.
- We lose some ROI when the Chef server and source control become out of sync.
- Traditionally, our sysadmins provisioned and configuring new local dev instances. But by handing off non-production configuration automation to DevOps, we get things done faster.
- Overall improvement in the way we manage the cloud infrastructure.
- Efficiency of operations with multiple environments.
- Quick turnaround if any changes are needed for any services.
April 05, 2019
Chef - Cooking up Trouble
- Led to concurrency in machine updates for our more extensive applications.
- Allowed team members to become effective in minimal time.
- Required extensive management of scripts and deployment when we want to update machines, making small changes a considerable undertaking.
March 06, 2019
Chef - Automate Out of Problems
- We can deploy tens to hundreds of servers in a small amount of time.
- We can grow our infrastructure very quickly with limited resources adjusting to customer demand as soon as the need arises.
- We are able to automate many of the mundane tasks that used to occupy the time of our engineers allowing us to focus on more critical tasks.
November 28, 2018
Get Cookin with Chef
- Able to reduce the numbers of hour a particular team would take for server maintain and deployment.
- Implementing Chef requires a change in paradigm for teams that are not open to the DevOps lifestyle. Half of the teams where Chef was introduced reverted backed to their old manual ways of doing things.
- Our timeline for code deployment went from once every two to three months, to about 1 month, then eventually once every 2 week sprint.
July 09, 2018
Chef for IaC and reliable deployments
- Chef is a good tool for baselining servers. It will be a good ROI when there are huge number of servers. For less number of servers maintaining a master will be an over head.
- One good ROI will be that the Operations Team also gets into agile and DevOps methodologies. Operational teams can start writing scripts/automations to keep their infra more stable and their application stack more reliable.
- Implementation of Chef eliminates the manual mode of doing things and everyone aligns to automation mind set. It helps in change of culture.
March 02, 2018
Centralized Configuration Management
- Any configuration management when done correctly will have a significant ROI. Chef in particular is great because the architecture, the language syntax and design is very innovative.
February 06, 2018
Chef @ SAP
- AD - active directory connection, which was done with Ohai and was a super generic cookbook that was marvelous and reduced all the setups in each server.
- Amazing time-saving cookbook.
March 24, 2017
Chef - Making Devops lives easier!
- Speed of deployment. If new environments are needed, Chef can speed that process up.
- Reliability of environments. Since Chef keeps things consistent, you know you're repeating your setup properly.
- Reduce long term devops effort. It may take an initial investment to setup, however long term it pays off in saving time once the scripts are written.
August 03, 2016
Chef - Automate Server Deployment
- While a lot of time can be spent getting the cookbooks built, the time it saves in the future is massive. It can takes hours to deploy a server by hand without missing a step, but Chef can take care of it all in 30 mins.
- A new team member could quickly deploy a new server in a pinch if needed to, but it could also take some time to get that team member up to speed on building out new cookbooks.
October 09, 2015
To Chef or not to Chef? That is the question.
- Increased employee efficiency.
- A way to maintain server build configurations.