Chef - Automate Out of Problems
March 06, 2019

Chef - Automate Out of Problems

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

Overall Satisfaction with Chef

Our organization uses Chef to deploy new code in an automated fashion. We also use it to update existing configurations and push those changes in an automated fashion to large groups of servers. Having the ability to deploy simple or full system changes out to a large group of servers with little human interaction has been a game changer for our company allowing us to deploy at scale and grow our infrastructure as our company grows.

Pros

  • Chef is great at deploying code to both small and large groups of servers.
  • We use chef to standup new servers as well as deploy updated code to existing servers and it does this very well.
  • Being able to make a change and have it push manually or automatically to any subset of servers has changed the landscape of how our IT teams operate.

Cons

  • Chef can be very complex, but therein also shows the unlimited possibilities of what you can do with it.
  • I would like some better reporting on the status of a deployment from Chef, but I feel this can be obtained with other products that can be incorporated to work in conjunction with Chef.
  • We can deploy tens to hundreds of servers in a small amount of time.
  • We can grow our infrastructure very quickly with limited resources adjusting to customer demand as soon as the need arises.
  • We are able to automate many of the mundane tasks that used to occupy the time of our engineers allowing us to focus on more critical tasks.
To be honest I believe SaltStack would provide a very similar experience to Chef and would allow us to automate much of our operational tasks in the same way, however I feel that Chef is more conducive to a mixed environment of Windows and Linux servers. This is the primary reason for choosing chef.
Chef works well and runs quickly for the most part. The only times we generally have an issue with timeouts or slow performance with Chef is when it requires access to or work with other applications or vendor software that is not responding or has a poor API interface to interact with the product.
The integrations with Chef are many and diverse, but not always the easiest thing to implement. There is a bit of a learning curve to make the integrations work, however there is a great customer base for Chef and many who are willing to help with configuration issues and solving coding problems.
Our organization uses Chef to deploy new code in an automated fashion and it excels in this aspect. It is also well suited to updating existing configurations and push those changes in an automated fashion to large groups of servers. Having the ability to deploy simple or full system changes out to a large group of servers with little human interaction has cut down on time lost spinning up individual servers and allowed our teams to focus on other, operational problems and made us more efficient in dealing with problems with impact customers as opposed to building servers. Chef has enabled us to deploy at scale and helped grow our infrastructure as our company grows.

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