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Progress Chef

Progress Chef

Overview

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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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

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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Chef EAS Experience

10 out of 10
October 05, 2022
Incentivized
We are leveraging Chef Enterprise Automation stack for its numerous benefits. Chef Habitat allows us to be more agile in our application …
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Get Cookin with Chef

9 out of 10
November 28, 2018
Incentivized
Chef is a tool that is being used as part of a DevOps enablement movement that we are implementing throughout our business unit, and …
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Awards

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Pricing

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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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  • No setup fee

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  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Product Details

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 Integrations

Progress Chef Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

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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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(49)

Community Insights

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!

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.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-3 of 3)
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Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
  • 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.
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.
  • 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.
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.
Support for Chef is easily available for fee or through the open source community as most the issues you will face will have been addressed through the Chef developer community forums. The documentation for Chef is moderate to great and easily readable.
February 21, 2020

Yes, Chef

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
  • 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.
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.
  • 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.
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.
I haven't yet needed to contact support for any reason. However, their documentation is excellent.
Gene Baker | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
  • System Configuration Recipes.
  • Configuration Management.
  • The recipe language could be a little more robust.
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.
  • Less time is spent troubleshooting configuration errors.
  • From the first time we see correct deployment of servers.
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.
There are training and professional services available for Chef in addition to just regular support. This shows that there is a commitment from the company for this product. We have not had to use the support team much, and have been pretty much self-reliant, although we do have support as is required by our enterprise.
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