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Progress Chef Reviews & Insights

Score6.5 out of 10

49 Reviews and Ratings

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Community insights

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

1 Review
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)

Yes, Chef

Rating: 9 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We're using Chef to deploy around 20 Linux machines that run some form of NoSQL database. We facilitate these using Chef roles and numerous cookbooks, some written in-house, and some community - depends on what is available. It's extremely powerful when making changes to a cluster environment and testing to ensure they pass tests we've implemented. Also, it makes it super easy to replace a machine if one should happen to go down. It's a real time saver compared to manually changing them one by one.

Pros

  • Once you have a cookbook, it can be reused or altered with ease.
  • Patches or swaths of changes are easy to apply to a subset of machines.

Cons

  • Counterintuitive when thinking about it from a scripting standpoint. e.g., it's about state and idempotence instead of scripts that can have unintended consequences.
  • It can cause headaches if you think about it as a scripting replacement. Both have their place, in my opinion.

Likelihood to Recommend

Once you get your head around what it's supposed to be for, it can save massive amounts of time and headache. Getting a working cookbook is the first time you get to see its value. For me, until that point, I thought Chef was a waste of time. It's very well suited for setting up and managing lots of servers that all need the same configuration, and allows for integration testing as well. I'd say it's not well suited the other way, like if you're only building one persistent machine. It would take more time to write a cookbook to set it up than just to set it up manually.
SZ
Sean Zef
Data Admin in Information Technology at Zef Enterprises, LLC (1-10 employees)
Vetted Review
Progress Chef
1 year of experience