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Chef made us realize our Infrastructure as code goals on cloud
July 26, 2019

Chef made us realize our Infrastructure as code goals on cloud

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

Overall Satisfaction with Chef

We use Chef to create our AWS environments with infrastructure as code, using Chef cookbook with recipes to create and configure services. Along with puppet, Chef made it easier to achieve IAAS for our cloud-based applications and to manage 6 different environments.
  • Easy to install and configure.
  • Ease of use.
  • You can spin up the environment in minutes.
  • Very simple syntax.
  • Easily replicated to build multiple environments.
  • Infrastructure as code goals.
  • Devops work is easier than ever.
  • It needs some initial learning curve.
  • Some Ruby knowledge is required.
  • For Infrastructure as code, you may have to disable all the services to configure any single service.
  • Overall improvement in the way we manage the cloud infrastructure.
  • Efficiency of operations with multiple environments.
  • Quick turnaround if any changes are needed for any services.
Chef is easy to install and manage, and the learning curve is minimal, as most of the engineers are already aware of the syntax to configure services. With flexible crating recipes and cookbooks, Chef made our jobs easier, and also it integrates well with Puppet. Overall satisfaction is very high, and we did not even consider other options.
Chef performs well, even with the cookbooks with a lot of recipes. Downtime for the applications will be minimum if you can make your infrastructure into code, as it only takes a few configuration changes and commands to build the complete environment. If you plan on adding multiple environments, Chef with Puppet works well.
Chef is easy to integrate with other tools like Puppet and Ansible. We are using Chef with Puppet, and I feel it is easy to integrate them together. Also, there is a good community help if you get stuck with creating recipes and issues integrating different services. Our overall experience is very good so far.
For our cloud-based applications with multiple environments and microservices, Chef made life easier with infrastructure as code. Along with using puppet, we can bring up or configure the environments in minutes. Any charges to services can be easily managed using recipes and cookbooks. It's easy to learn, with much less/no learning curve if you know Linux/ruby. It's flexible to manage multiple cookbooks for different environments, and works well with the puppet.