Get Cookin with Chef
November 28, 2018
Get Cookin with Chef
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Chef
Chef is a tool that is being used as part of a DevOps enablement movement that we are implementing throughout our business unit, and hopefully our organization in the future. It will help automate the manual task of creating and configuring new servers, testing existing servers for compliance regulations, as well as providing on-going maintenance for our infrastructure.
- Chef is very easy to learn. Written in ruby, Chef code is high enough level for non-ruby coders to get a general idea of what the script is doing.
- Chef can be a one stop shop for writing code, testing infrastructure, and deployment of applications.
- The Chef support team is very helpful in their auto manager support as well as active support in their Slack channels from development engineers & architects.
- It would be nice if kitchen didn't only have a vagrant/virtual-box prerequisite. Our company one day stop allowing virtual-box to run without special privileges, and that caused a lot of issues for people trying to do kitchen tests.
- Chef could use more practice materials for the advanced certification badges. There was not a lot of guidance in what to study or examples of certain topics.
- Able to reduce the numbers of hour a particular team would take for server maintain and deployment.
- Implementing Chef requires a change in paradigm for teams that are not open to the DevOps lifestyle. Half of the teams where Chef was introduced reverted backed to their old manual ways of doing things.
- Our timeline for code deployment went from once every two to three months, to about 1 month, then eventually once every 2 week sprint.
We believe Chef is a great tool for DevOp. It works really well with repository tools such as Bitbucket and artifactory. The other products we evaluated either were too pricey or did not have the support we needed for a company that was very vanilla with automation. We selected Chef before of its easy of use and how fairly quick we were able o pick up its concepts and train out team.