Chef Reviews

The most helpful aspect of Chef is its ability to automate and manage infrastructure as code.

Chef supports various operating systems and cloud platforms, making it versatile for managing heterogeneous environments.

I like the features for auditing and ensuring compliance with security policies. It helps organizations maintain a secure and compliant infrastructure.

And I like a chef-automate dashboard.

Proper testing of cookbooks is crucial, and setting up a testing environment can require additional effort. Some colleagues find the testing and development process more involved compared to simpler tools.

Lack of documentation or may lack real-world examples for practical scenarios.

I use Chef for post-build installation and configuration of software, significantly reducing the time required during server setup

They are very easy to use and makes things easy to understand. The customer support is great too.

There is really nothing I do not like about it.

Automation and human entry error.

Best configuration management tool for applying on multiple servers at once.

Troubleshooting cookbook errors. Logs are difficult to read. Installing agent process is a tedious work.

Ease of server provisioning and initial state setup.

With Chef, we are able to manage nodes in a new way. Our clients get insight into the health, configuration, and compliance of their system in a single platform. Also, since everything is in code, the ways to customize cookbooks, inspec profiles, and tailor policy for each node are limitless.

The Chef community definitely has some growing to do. Progress Chef has been making an effort to listen to community members and they need to continue their journey of building up the community to what it once was.

Continued enforcement. Knowing that my nodes are checking in regularly so that I can pin point when something unexpected occurs is huge. The automate dashboard gives me visibility at a glance to track down anomolies.

Learn Chef and online documentation are both top-notch.

Learn Chef has been invaluable for our team and is probably one of the best free vendor-hosted training tools we've encountered with any of our vendors.

Our most significant issue is keeping up as the product evolves. We are still using Berkshelf and are struggling to find the time to learn about policy files to facilitate the transition away from Berkshelf.

First and foremost, we use Chef for the configuration management of our Windows Servers. In the past, we used a lot of PowerShell scripts and Group Policy to manage configuration. As our environment grew and we went from one or two Active Directory domains to five or six, Group Policy became more problematic. Chef has allowed us to utilize the same configuration source regardless of the domain the system resides in and even for those not in an AD Domain.

Now that we are managing most of our Windows Server configuration with Chef, we are now moving into using Chef for compliance purposes.

I like their support and Chef meetings plus Chef is easy to manage and implement when the company has great support, it does adds to the value of the product.

Nothing, it's a great product, and it is very well supportred.

If there is a problem, we report it at the meetings and it usually gets quickly resolved.

In my experience, Progress Chef has several strengths that make it a compelling choice for organizations looking to streamline their infrastructure management.

Firstly, Chef's declarative language makes it easy to define and manage the desired state of infrastructure components. By defining "recipes" and "cookbooks" that describe the desired configuration of each resource, Chef ensures that the infrastructure remains consistent and predictable across environments.

Another strength of Chef is its flexibility and extensibility. Chef has a large community of users and contributors who have created a wide range of plugins, integrations, and cookbooks that can be used to automate everyday tasks and integrate with other tools. This makes Progress Chef easy to customize Chef to suit an organisation's specific needs, whether a small startup or a large enterprise.

However, like any tool, Progress Chef also has some potential drawbacks. For example, it can have a steep learning curve, especially for those new to infrastructure automation or programming. Additionally, Chef's complexity and flexibility can sometimes make troubleshooting problems or maintaining large codebases difficult.

Progress Chef helps me to solve the following problems in my IT environment:

Ensuring consistency: With Chef, IT professionals can define the desired configuration of each component in their infrastructure as code. This ensures that the infrastructure remains consistent and predictable across environments, reducing the risk of human error and simplifying troubleshooting.

Automating tasks: Chef allows IT professionals to automate many of the tasks involved in managing infrastructure, such as provisioning new servers, deploying applications, and configuring network settings. This can save significant time and effort, freeing IT professionals to focus on higher-level tasks.

Scaling infrastructure: Chef makes it easier to scale infrastructure resources up or down in response to changing demand. This can help organizations save costs by only using the resources they need, and it can also improve reliability and performance by allowing resources to be added or removed as needed.

Improving security: Chef can help IT professionals improve the security of their infrastructure by automating the configuration of security settings and policies, such as firewalls and access controls. This can help reduce the risk of security breaches and ensure that the infrastructure remains compliant with relevant regulations and standards.

Automation has never been so easy to do, whether it is a server or other software-related workload; the progressive chef is handy has always been a forte. My team started using progressive chef before puppet or even ansible, and it's still everyone's favorite

Not everyone had it easy with how to use it from the start, but after a while, everyone was alright. Create more developer advocates and communities around the product.

Devops tooling for the automation of our software systems. We used chef to automate our Quality Assurance environment before deploying it into production. We have been able to reduce technical debt and go faster then if we were not using it

We have used Chef for 10+ years as our configuration management tool. The Chef Infra infrastructure has been robust and provided a stable platform for us to develop against. The out of box functionality solves many of our use cases and the Chef DSL provides enough extensibility that we can create functionality for our specific use cases.

My main dislike about Chef is the care and feeding required to perform a chef-client update. Usually, taking a chef-client upgrade takes us at least a month to work through rolling it out across our organization. We have chef-client running daemonized in many environments, and the upgrade process stops the automatic runs for about a 24-hour period, which means we could have server drift during this window. This means we have to be picky about which version of chef-client we run, and usually wait until a new major version is released, upgrade, and then sit on that version until EOL. Ideally, we'd love to keep that current as much as possible.

The main business process Chef is helping us to resolve is keeping our fleet of servers standardized and consistent. It allows us to use automation and code to keep systems up to date and current with our standards and reduces our reliance on humans to do much of that work.

Most of our client uses Chef to deploy new code in an automated fashion. We also use it to update existing configurations and push those changes in an automated fashion to large groups of servers. Having the ability to deploy simple or full system changes out to a large group of servers with little human interaction has been a game changer for our company allowing us to deploy at scale and grow our infrastructure as our company grows.

It is very complex tool and The Chef-client agent needs to be run on the nodes frequently to update the details of it state to master. And also to index the nodes based on tags.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?