Item: Progress Chef
Rating: 8
Author: Rob Ericsson

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used Chef to automate our deployment of development demo systems at Rizing. Previously, creating new system was a time-consuming human driven process. With Chef, we were able to automate and standardize many steps of our deployment process reducing the time required and improving the consistency and quality of the systems deployed.

Pros and Cons

Enabling the use of system configuration as code
Automating the deployment process
Ensuring that the deployed system comply with corporate and security standards

The array of tools can be confusing - a unified approach would make things easier
The domain specific language is powerful but has a learning curve
Need to use other tools to complete our deployment

Return on Investment

Reduced our time to deploy servers to support the business
Increased our confidence that deployed servers meet internal and external standards
Licensing wasn't granular enough to reflect our true use of the tools

Alternatives Considered

Puppet Enterprise and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

We considered the three leading competitors in the field: Chef, Puppet and Ansible. Ansible is a very strong competitor and has a nice degree of flexibility in that it does not require a client install. Instead the configuration is delivered by SSH which is very simple. Puppet seems like it has fallen off the pace of the competition and lacked the strong community offered by Chef. We chose Chef because of the strong support by the company and the dynamic and deep community support.

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

Other Software Used

Terraform

Likelihood to Recommend

Chef is a very nice tool for establishing and maintaining a consistent configuration across a range of servers. In addition, Automate allows the continued monitoring and maintenance of servers so they don't drift from established standards. Overall, it deals very well with complex systems.

Chef is slightly less applicable for a micro-services approach where the servers are replicated from a simple and known starting point.

Chef delivers a delicious solution for server deployment and configuration

Software Version

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with Chef, from Progress