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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
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|---|---|
| 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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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 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.
- 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.
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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.
- 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
- 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.
- Ansible, Puppet Enterprise (formerly Puppet Data Center Automation) and Puppet Pipelines (formerly Distelli)
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.
- 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.
- 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.
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 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.
- 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
- 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.
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
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.
- 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.
- 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.
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.