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Chef - Making Devops lives easier!
March 24, 2017

Chef - Making Devops lives easier!

Kevin Van Heusen | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Chef

We use Chef for building out our environments in our development organization. It solves the problem of having a repeatable setup, once the Chef scripts are defined we can reliably deploy a similar environment as many times as needed. We don't need to guess at what we used to install on windows machines.
  • Configuration by code means that we can check in the Chef setup in a source control repository and everyone can view what changes are being made.
  • Great Windows support, Chef treats Windows as a first class customer and has great support for configuring various Windows OS properties.
  • Good documentation and support from the Chef team.
  • Chef client setup is a bit complicated, would be nice to have a streamlined installer instead of requiring command line
  • Chef user interface could be improved, would be nice to have UI options for some of the setup parameters.
  • Would be nice to be able to do one off installs/run commands. We have clients already setup talking to a server, would be a good opportunity to send commands to them.
  • 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.
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.
Chef is great for ensuring you have a repeatable infrastructure. Gone are the days of manually tweaking settings and then trying to remember what you did six months later. Chef enables your team to keep tabs on what's being changed due to its ability to keep its configuration and scripts inside source control. You can look at the history of what was configured and when.