TrustRadius Insights for Progress Chef are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
Powerful Configuration Management: Many users have found Chef to be a powerful tool for system configuration management, allowing them to efficiently manage and control the configurations of their infrastructure. With its comprehensive features and capabilities, Chef provides users with a reliable solution for ensuring consistency across their systems.
Flexible Code-Based Configuration: The use of code-based configuration in Chef has been highly praised by users for its flexibility and customizability. This feature enables users to easily define and modify configurations using code, providing greater control over their infrastructure. Additionally, the ability to track changes in a source control repository adds an extra layer of visibility and traceability.
Excellent Windows OS Support: Users appreciate Chef's excellent support for Windows OS properties, making it an ideal choice for configuring Windows systems. This robust support ensures that administrators can effectively manage and maintain their Windows servers, simplifying tasks such as software installation, configuration updates, and server deployment.
Progress Chef Reviews
9 Reviews
Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees)
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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
Enabling the use of system configuration as code
Automating the deployment process
Ensuring that the deployed system comply with corporate and security standards
Cons
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
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 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.
Pros
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.
Cons
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
VU
Verified User
Analyst in Information Technology (51-200 employees)
We are using Chef across many teams, both operations and development. We use Chef to manage configuration for our on-premise systems.
Pros
Configuration Management: Chef is an easy and efficient way to manage configurations, both during and post-deployment of your systems.
Visibility: Chef Automate provides great insight into your infrastructure and gathers huge amounts of data to give you insight into system configuration.
Integrations: Chef is working hard to provide meaningful integrations to Chef Automate that will allow it to rise to its extremely powerful potential.
Customer Success
Community: The Chef community is second to none! Chef has really done great work ensuring they have fostered a friendly, welcoming, and inclusive community for their users.
Ease of use: Once you get your hands around it, Chef is very easy to use. Many resources within Chef follow similar patterns so it’s relatively easy to develop basic cookbooks right from the beginning.
Ease of migration: Because many initial users of Chef are not necessarily comfortable “coding”, Chef gives the ability to plug scripts into resources making migrating from bash and power shell scripting extremely easy. As you get comfortable, plugging and playing Chef resources in place of once used scripts is mostly seamless.
Cons
Dashboards: Automate is a very powerful tool. They should allow the creation of custom dashboards by users themselves, as there are too many use cases for the data provided by Chef for a single company to try to stay on top of that.
Extending User Roles: Dashboards should tie into IAM roles within the platform. Let me show users what they care about without them having to know what to filter.
Limitations in Provided Integrations and Within Automate: Chef has provided a great integration with AWS, allowing one to scan entire accounts or ec2 instances within an account. That said, using this as a scheduled job only scans ec2 instances that exist at the time the job is set up. Continuous scanning of assets within the account through the integration appears to not be occurring, which is a real bummer. Additionally, I think it's important to get user input into how they're actually expecting to use the tool to fully understand what users need in terms of automation, especially around the compliance portion of the tool. Finally, I think it's important to ensure that key features (like scheduled scan jobs) work in the desired way or document workarounds prominently.
Communication with existing customers: As stated above, if something doesn't work exactly as it should, there's no shame in effectively communicating known workarounds to customers and users. We understand improvement takes pain sometimes, but if you know a way around it, throw that information out there and save others some valuable time.
Likelihood to Recommend
Chef is extremely valuable when there is a need to manage configurations. Chef is also becoming extremely useful for one-off changes with their chef-run tooling in Chef Workstation. Habitat is becoming increasingly beneficial for the cloud/containerized immutable world. Inspec is something companies shouldn't live without. Chef appears to be working hard to ensure that no matter the use case they have the ability to help make lives easier and more automated.
We use Chef to create our AWS environments with infrastructure as code, using Chef cookbook with recipes to create and configure services. Along with puppet, Chef made it easier to achieve IAAS for our cloud-based applications and to manage 6 different environments.
Pros
Easy to install and configure.
Ease of use.
You can spin up the environment in minutes.
Very simple syntax.
Easily replicated to build multiple environments.
Infrastructure as code goals.
Devops work is easier than ever.
Cons
It needs some initial learning curve.
Some Ruby knowledge is required.
For Infrastructure as code, you may have to disable all the services to configure any single service.
Likelihood to Recommend
For our cloud-based applications with multiple environments and microservices, Chef made life easier with infrastructure as code. Along with using puppet, we can bring up or configure the environments in minutes. Any charges to services can be easily managed using recipes and cookbooks. It's easy to learn, with much less/no learning curve if you know Linux/ruby. It's flexible to manage multiple cookbooks for different environments, and works well with the puppet.
Our organization 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.
Pros
Chef is great at deploying code to both small and large groups of servers.
We use chef to standup new servers as well as deploy updated code to existing servers and it does this very well.
Being able to make a change and have it push manually or automatically to any subset of servers has changed the landscape of how our IT teams operate.
Cons
Chef can be very complex, but therein also shows the unlimited possibilities of what you can do with it.
I would like some better reporting on the status of a deployment from Chef, but I feel this can be obtained with other products that can be incorporated to work in conjunction with Chef.
Likelihood to Recommend
Our organization uses Chef to deploy new code in an automated fashion and it excels in this aspect. It is also well suited to updating 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 cut down on time lost spinning up individual servers and allowed our teams to focus on other, operational problems and made us more efficient in dealing with problems with impact customers as opposed to building servers. Chef has enabled us to deploy at scale and helped grow our infrastructure as our company grows.
VU
Verified User
Administrator in Information Technology (201-500 employees)
Chef is a great technology for centralized configuration management. Therefore it's perfect for configuring complex, interconnected systems where parameters may be shared, or facts (e.g. ip address,..etc) about other nodes are needed to populate configuration files. Chef provides advanced capabilities such as encrypted data bags (to store configuration variables), versioning, roles, cookbooks repositories,..etc. It's very advanced and great system for managing large and complex clusters.
Pros
Centralized Configuration Management; Chef really excels at that as it provides a wide range of features that are well thought of, such as data bags, encrypted data bags, roles, shared repositories, cookbooks versioning, environment locking..etc
Chef is based on Ruby and therefore it has all the capabilities of this powerful scripting language, unlike other tools that has its own DSL. This means greater flexibility to implement really custom logic.
Chef community has made an impressive progress with regards to automated testing of cookbooks.
Cons
Chef complexity sometimes backfires when managing large clusters. Since a node can have different sources for variables, it can easily get messy and hard to troubleshoot.
Likelihood to Recommend
Chef is great for managing complex and interconnected ecosystems. The centralized server makes it easy to gather facts from all nodes and store all parameter in centralized repository. For example, consider a scenario where your shared, main database hostname is going to change. With Chef, you can change the data bag and it will update all applications that are using this parameter.
For simpler, quick and dirty needs. Chef overhead may not always be necessary. In those cases, Chef solo can be used but I still see other tools are more appropriate for that case.
We use Chef for building out our environments in our development organization. It solves the problem of having a repeatable setup, once the Chef scripts are defined we can reliably deploy a similar environment as many times as needed. We don't need to guess at what we used to install on windows machines.
Pros
Configuration by code means that we can check in the Chef setup in a source control repository and everyone can view what changes are being made.
Great Windows support, Chef treats Windows as a first class customer and has great support for configuring various Windows OS properties.
Good documentation and support from the Chef team.
Cons
Chef client setup is a bit complicated, would be nice to have a streamlined installer instead of requiring command line
Chef user interface could be improved, would be nice to have UI options for some of the setup parameters.
Would be nice to be able to do one off installs/run commands. We have clients already setup talking to a server, would be a good opportunity to send commands to them.
Likelihood to Recommend
Chef is great for ensuring you have a repeatable infrastructure. Gone are the days of manually tweaking settings and then trying to remember what you did six months later. Chef enables your team to keep tabs on what's being changed due to its ability to keep its configuration and scripts inside source control. You can look at the history of what was configured and when.
We use Chef within our Infrastructure Engineering team. Each of our cookbooks is built with the purpose of automating the deployment of a server. Our end goal is to be able to simply run Chef to build out an server with no user intervention. We currently use Chef to perform functions like, but not limited to: Adding Linux and Windows servers to Active Directory, installing IIS and creating functioning sites, installing various applications, and configuring HAProxy servers. Within a minutes, we are able to run a Knife command to build a server in our AWS account, and have that server completely functional within 30 mins.
Pros
Server deployment. We can knife servers within 30 minutes.
Automates software installs.
If built out correctly, it takes care of all the little configuration details Admins forget when deploying a new server.
There is tons of documentation out there to help you accomplish just about anything with Chef.
Cons
Coding experience is required. The more you know, the more you'll be able to do with Chef. Chef training is recommended.
Sometimes your cookbooks will break due to changes in dependencies. Not Chef's fault, but a fault with the overall path. It can be difficult to track down the issues at times.
Chef is overwhelming at first. There's a lot of odds and ends to take in that I found you just needed to learn with time, patience, and practice.
Likelihood to Recommend
Chef is suited for just about any situations in which you need to automate a process on a server. Once you've built out a cookbook, the chef run with take care of everything for you. Assuming nothing changes, you never have to worry about it again. The great thing about it is it's meant to automate everything so you, and your colleagues don't have to worry about it anything. You can make changes in one cookbook that can then update an entire farm of servers.
I developed chef cookbooks to initially be used with provisioning our vagrant instances so that developers could have a working copy of the dev environment on their local machines. Since then, we have used chef to provision dev servers and also with packer to build images. It is primarily used with the dev team.
Pros
Provides a programmatic approach to automation that makes sense for developers.
Cons
There seems to be issues when using a cookbook on vagrant via chef solo and on a production environment being orchestrated by rightscale. Would love it if the cookbooks worked seamlessly between the two.
Likelihood to Recommend
Depends if your operations team has a programming background. If your operations team is not well versed in programming then it might be difficult or you are working with an outdated team. Things like puppet, ansible, or even saltstack seem to be more user friendly for older operations people. Also, the learning curve for chef can be intimidating.
