1. Home
  2. Configuration Management Tools
  3. Progress Chef Reviews
  4. User Review of Progress Chef
Chef as a robust open source alternative to licensed configuration management tool
April 29, 2020

Chef as a robust open source alternative to licensed configuration management tool

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

Overall Satisfaction with Chef

Chef is used as one of the Configuration Management tool spanning both cloud and on-prem infrastructure for the whole organization. This makes it easy to monitor, management, and audit the various middleware and infrastructure components spanning on-prem and cloud environment.
  • Chef has templates that come pre-packaged that makes it easy to manage simple to moderate complexity infrastructure.
  • There Is enough community support from both large and small vendors to help get templates ('receipts') for various deployment scenarios.
  • Chef has breadth of support for both applications and the infrastructure, reducing the number of tools needed to manage the IT environment.
  • The management console can be improved to add more metrics for monitoring, especially for applications.
  • Chef can improve support for hybrid cloud deployments, especially spanning multiple clouds. Currently, this is done manually.
  • More templates ('recipes') for Internet-scale deployments, with a focus on monitoring and auditing for compliance.
  • Positive impact on the business by reducing the upfront cost to purchase Chef licenses and support through the use of an open-source version of Chef.
  • Positive impact on IT spent by reducing the cost needed to maintain a large scale IT environment.
  • Improved ROI from IT through better and more realtime management of the applications and the infrastructure across cloud and on-prem deployment.
Puppet Labs and CFEngine are also open source and competes with Chef. Chef has more support from the community with templates available for large scale IT deployments. RedHat Ansible is better suited when you are already using RedHat OS and OpenShift since it comes as it comes prebuilt for it. BMC, VMware vCenter and other commercial offerings are better suited when the DevOps and IT capabilities are limited internally.
Support for Chef is easily available for fee or through the open source community as most the issues you will face will have been addressed through the Chef developer community forums. The documentation for Chef is moderate to great and easily readable.

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

Chef is very well suited if you already have an in-house DevOps teams that have many years of experience working on Chef or related tools. Chef also works well when you need a lot of customization of the monitoring and management tool and related dashboards due to the complexity of the underlying IT. It is less appropriate for small IT environments or where internal IT expertise is limited.