Item: Progress Chef
Rating: 9
Author: Sean Zef

Overall Satisfaction with Chef

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We're using Chef to deploy around 20 Linux machines that run some form of NoSQL database. We facilitate these using Chef roles and numerous cookbooks, some written in-house, and some community - depends on what is available. It's extremely powerful when making changes to a cluster environment and testing to ensure they pass tests we've implemented. Also, it makes it super easy to replace a machine if one should happen to go down. It's a real time saver compared to manually changing them one by one.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Once you have a cookbook, it can be reused or altered with ease.
Patches or swaths of changes are easy to apply to a subset of machines.

Cons

Counterintuitive when thinking about it from a scripting standpoint. e.g., it's about state and idempotence instead of scripts that can have unintended consequences.
It can cause headaches if you think about it as a scripting replacement. Both have their place, in my opinion.

Return on Investment

There have been many positive impacts for managing large amounts of servers with ease.
It took a while to realize the ROI due to the initial learning curve of the software from 'traditional' approaches.

Alternatives Considered

Puppet Enterprise (formerly Puppet Data Center Automation)

Briefly looked into Puppet but ended up going with Chef because a colleague had experience with it instead. Didn't get far enough into a deployment to even really compare the two.

Support Rating

I haven't yet needed to contact support for any reason. However, their documentation is excellent.

Key Insights

Do you think Progress Chef delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Progress Chef's feature set?

Yes

Did Progress Chef live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Progress Chef go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Progress Chef again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

Once you get your head around what it's supposed to be for, it can save massive amounts of time and headache. Getting a working cookbook is the first time you get to see its value. For me, until that point, I thought Chef was a waste of time. It's very well suited for setting up and managing lots of servers that all need the same configuration, and allows for integration testing as well. I'd say it's not well suited the other way, like if you're only building one persistent machine. It would take more time to write a cookbook to set it up than just to set it up manually.

Comments

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Yes, Chef