Helm is an open source Kubernetes package manager.
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Progress Chef
Score 6.5 out of 10
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Chef IT infrastructure automation suites were developed by Chef Software in Seattle and acquired by Progress Software in September 2020. The Chef Enterprise Automation Stack is an integrated suite of automation technologies presented as a solution for delivering change quickly, repeatedly, and securely over every application's lifecycle. The Chef Effortless Infrastructure Suit is an integrated suite of automation technologies to codify infrastructure, security, and compliance, as well as…
Deployment of helm charts is really fundamental to any software packages to our Kubernetes/docker containers, and without Helm, I cannot imagine how else to manage software components upgrades. When it works, it works great, when it doesn't - the world has not come to an end, there is rollback, and it's great, but troubleshooting does take time. And there is a learning curve. But it be worth it.
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 is very easy to learn. Written in ruby, Chef code is high enough level for non-ruby coders to get a general idea of what the script is doing.
Chef can be a one stop shop for writing code, testing infrastructure, and deployment of applications.
The Chef support team is very helpful in their auto manager support as well as active support in their Slack channels from development engineers & architects.
One main concern with Chef is the maintainability of Chef master.
The Chef-client should be installed on every node we want to do any automation.
It is mostly Ruby and there's a learning curve. Need to understand the fundamentals of Chef very throughly to play around with attributes, templates etc etc.
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.
The suite of tools is very powerful. The ability to create custom modules allows for unlimited potential for managing all aspects of a system. However, there is pretty significant learning curve with the toolset. It currently takes approx 3-4 months for new engineers to feel comfortable with our implementation
It loads quick enough for basically all our systems. Because we have this for local dev environments, speed isn't really a big issue here. Yes, depending on the system, sometimes it does take a relatively long time, but it's not an issue for me. One thing that is annoying is that if I want to make a small change to a cookbook and re-run the Chef client, I can't just make the change in the cache and run it. I have to do the whole process of updating the server.
We didn't really need support, but the open-source community seemed responsive and informative when it came to issues. Many cloud native consultancy companies (including ourselves) offer support for Helm.
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.
We have a natural trending to use what is a reference in its space and Helm has being leader in its area for a long time. Since it has all features we need didn't make sense to us to invest time on researching and testing other alternatives, so Helm was our first and only tool in regards of automating deployments on Kubernetes
Chef is the more developer-oriented of the three main tools in this space. It has a steeper learning curve as a result but it allows you to do more. Puppet seems to be more geared towards automated the management of the operating system. Ansible is an excellent tool but requires you to allow SSH connectivity into all of your instances.
