Chef PAYG
Progress Software CorporationExternal reviews
89 reviews
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Good tool for Cloud support
What do you like best about the product?
Agnostic tool that can provide support across cloud environments. Avoiding code lock-in is a best practice for us.
What do you dislike about the product?
There are dependencies across versions that can problematic. Changes to the user interface were not ideal.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Having a single source for our automation allows us to maximize the value of those scripts and gain speed in deployments across environments.
I love Chef!
What do you like best about the product?
Chef works best to enable our team to keep a tight watch on security concerns while allowing developers to create self-service vms and bootstrap them with their custom cookbooks.
What do you dislike about the product?
The biggest downside is that we have to use WSL to use test kitchen.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Chef solves the problem of how we transition from a "pets" to "cattle" server model.
Easy to learn and implement
What do you like best about the product?
It is easy to pick up the concepts and even easier to implement
What do you dislike about the product?
Moving between versions can be a headache.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Compliance reporting and easier configuration management
A Great Configuration Management tool
What do you like best about the product?
- Great centralized features: data bags (central data storage), encrypted data bags, restricting script (cookbook) version on given nodes...etc.
- Amazing ruby-based syntax. This what makes Chef my preferred configuration management tool over other tools that use their own DSL. You can always use Ruby directly for complex tasks
- Open source: Chef has an open source version that does not lack important features
- Ability to test your Chef scripts (recipes and cookbooks) using automated InSpec tests
- Amazing ruby-based syntax. This what makes Chef my preferred configuration management tool over other tools that use their own DSL. You can always use Ruby directly for complex tasks
- Open source: Chef has an open source version that does not lack important features
- Ability to test your Chef scripts (recipes and cookbooks) using automated InSpec tests
What do you dislike about the product?
- There is some learning curve involved, but it's worth it
- It might be an overkill for simple automations
- It might be an overkill for simple automations
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Automates compute nodes configuration, so solves problems like: environment inconsistencies, speed up deploying new nodes, ..etc
Chef'ing up Liferay
What do you like best about the product?
I like chef because it uses DSL for configuration instead of XML, Rackspace supports it very well, etc. However the absolute best thing about Chef is the concept of recipes where you can get your platform up and configured extremely easily if that platform has a chef recipe. In addition most large platforms do have chef recipes so it's great! Also, I like that it;s open source
What do you dislike about the product?
Some of the things i dislike about chef, and this might jkust be a criticism of configuration management in general, is that you need pretty much a full team to support it. Sometimes I feel like it adds more complexity instead of kless.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
The biggest issue we are solving with Chef is the knowledge gap that exists in new employees when first learning out platforms. previous it would take months for new developers to become effective because they spend several months fighting with the platform, build tools, etc. Chef makes this much less of a hassle
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Learn it well before you try to incorporate it in your enterprise
Infrastructure as code never looked so intimidating and yet hopeful
What do you like best about the product?
The ability to code infrastructure and then run it in action from a single line command is amazing. Imagine spinning up not just 1, but an entire stack of services at once (a whole ecosystem). That's the power of Chef.
What do you dislike about the product?
The problems are myriad. Chef does not have an easy way to pick up for beginners. Most cookbooks are focused on Linux, not Windows. And whenever a deployment breaks, tracing it is a huge pain as there stacktrace is not very informative.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Chef solves the problem of continuously updating and deploying your software ecosystem from scratch for different purposes and even clients. This helps to make infrastructure development verifiable and repeatable.
Great tool for system configuration management
What do you like best about the product?
Chef is pretty solid for configuration management of Windows machines and ensuring that they are all setup and provisioned the same way. The setup and scripting of recipes is pretty extensive, and Windows support is solid. There are a variety of recipes to do most windows configuration needed, as well as Linux.
What do you dislike about the product?
The setup is pretty complex, it can take awhile to just setup a server and figure out how to connect a client to it. It would be nice to have more functionality exposed in the Chef GUI, using command line for a majority of tasks can be tedious at times. Chef is mainly geared toward ensuring a server is configured properly, but it would be nice to have the option for 'one off' tasks. When you have agents already running on your systems for Chef it would be nice to run a task on a subset of machines instead of yet another agent and management system for that. It also runs best if you have a person dedicated to the configuration and on going maintenance of Chef. It takes some effort to keep up on your recipes.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Chef solves the system configuration management issue pretty well, it is able to ensure that machines are setup similarly. The 'configuration as code' aspect makes it clear to the organization what is involved in setting up and configuration of a server. It helps to document the process as long as you follow through on continuously adding recipes as you move along.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
If you are using Azure, check out Microsoft's Azure lab on setting up Chef, it significantly speeds up the implementation process. Be sure to run through some tutorials and documentation on the Chef website as it is very difficult to setup straight out of the box. There aren't really any wizards or in-product tutorials.
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