Chef @ SAP
February 06, 2018

Chef @ SAP

Ofir Gutmacher | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Chef

Chef is used as a middleware for our private managed cloud software. Chef is used in an in-house utility called Arc, that installs a Chef-agent in each server that users spin up, and then run all the cookbooks that are in the run list.

The business problems [it addresses] are: tidy up servers, control the diverse apps versions, generate a catalogue of apps and configs for the company's usage.

Pros

  • Attributes in files can be changed once, instead of walking all over the recipes.
  • Ohai - generates machine parameters non-stop.
  • Databags keep some more secured information for usage with the recipes.

Cons

  • Chef, unlike Ansible, must use its own agent. Ansible just uses the "already" pre pared "SSH" utility.
  • Engine run time - need to speed up the time for cookbooks run, like in ZEROMQ of SALTSTACK.
  • 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.
Chef is good for organizations with many servers, because of the client-server approach. I guess Ansible can be used for some 20-40 servers, just ssh and run the playbook. Chef is in ruby which is a really simple to learn language as opposed to competitiors.
Well, in case we have more than 10,000 servers, and configuration must be run on them, we use Chef.

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