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To Chef or not to Chef? That is the question.
October 09, 2015

To Chef or not to Chef? That is the question.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

12

Overall Satisfaction with Chef

I developed chef cookbooks to initially be used with provisioning our vagrant instances so that developers could have a working copy of the dev environment on their local machines. Since then, we have used chef to provision dev servers and also with packer to build images. It is primarily used with the dev team.
  • Provides a programmatic approach to automation that makes sense for developers.
  • There seems to be issues when using a cookbook on vagrant via chef solo and on a production environment being orchestrated by rightscale. Would love it if the cookbooks worked seamlessly between the two.
  • Increased employee efficiency.
  • A way to maintain server build configurations.
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.
Depends if your operations team has a programming background. If your operations team is not well versed in programming then it might be difficult or you are working with an outdated team. Things like puppet, ansible, or even saltstack seem to be more user friendly for older operations people. Also, the learning curve for chef can be intimidating.