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Progress Chef

Score6.5 out of 10

49 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Progress Chef?

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 auditing and managing architectures.

Categories & Use Cases

Reviews

What users are saying about Progress Chef.
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Chef delivers a delicious solution for server deployment and configuration

Incentivized
Rob EricssonView profile
Senior Vice President Of Product Development in Product Management at Rizing (501-1000 employees employees)

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

Return on Investment

  • Reduced our time to deploy servers to support the business
  • Increased our confidence that deployed servers meet internal and external standards
  • Licensing wasn't granular enough to reflect our true use of the tools

Alternatives Considered

Puppet Enterprise and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Other Software Used

Terraform

Yes, Chef

Incentivized
Sean Zef
Data Admin in Information Technology at Zef Enterprises, LLC (1-10 employees employees)

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.

Return on Investment

  • There have been many positive impacts for managing large amounts of servers with ease.
  • It took a while to realize the ROI due to the initial learning curve of the software from 'traditional' approaches.

Alternatives Considered

Puppet Enterprise (formerly Puppet Data Center Automation)

Repeatable Server Configuration and Deployment

Incentivized
Gene BakerView profile
Vice President, Chief Architect, Development Manager and Software Engineer in Information Technology at WySTAR Global Retirement Solutions, a Wells Fargo Company (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

  • System Configuration Recipes.
  • Configuration Management.

Cons

  • The recipe language could be a little more robust.

Return on Investment

  • Less time is spent troubleshooting configuration errors.
  • From the first time we see correct deployment of servers.

Alternatives Considered

Puppet Enterprise (formerly Puppet Data Center Automation), IBM UrbanCode Deploy, Juju and Ansible

Other Software Used

Puppet Enterprise (formerly Puppet Data Center Automation), CollabNet VersionOne

Chef EAS Experience

Incentivized
Verified User
Manager in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are leveraging Chef Enterprise Automation stack for its numerous benefits. Chef Habitat allows us to be more agile in our application deployment and reducing the installation efforts. Chef Inspec assists with auditing to ensure that the expected changes have been applied. Chef Automate provides a single window into the status of our entire managed fleet of endpoints. These products integrate very well together and make managing multiple large datacenters a lot less effort.

Pros

  • Communication. The entire staff of different service areas have been very timely in communications
  • Helpfulness. We purchased professional services and that team was great helping with our initial onboarding

Cons

  • Documentation. Documentation is often confusing and trial by error typically leads to desired results
  • Learning curve of products. There is steep learning curve for all products offered. Could be more streamlined by less emphasis on various cli tools and more ui functionality for less experienced professionals

Return on Investment

  • We have reduced our time to deploy application updates from weeks to days
  • Our time to mitigate vulnerabilities has reduced from days to hours.

Usability

Cooking up savings, one local dev environment at a time

Incentivized
Christopher Maggiulli
Enterprise Software Architect in Research & Development at Latham Pool Products Inc (1001-5000 employees employees)

Pros

  • The best things about Chef are the Cookbooks, making implementation fast
  • Very wide adoption in the open source community
  • I love the Ruby DSL
  • Love that it's implemented in Erlang which makes it especially quick

Cons

  • It's developer-oriented, which I like, but some of our sysadmins use Chef too, and they aren't great with it. It would be nice if there was a layer of abstracting for simple jobs to reach a wider user audience
  • For somewhat of same reason, it's harder to manage than Ansible
  • The absolute biggest issue is source of truth. You can't use git as your source of truth in Chef like you can in Ansible
  • It's also hard to manage because your have to keep your Chef server and repo in sync

Return on Investment

  • Huge return when onboarding new developers. We run a lot of platforms at my company (Liferay, Hybris, Oracle SOA, RabbitMQ, ColdFusion 8, ColdFusion 11, Oracle Service Cloud, and many more). To get these local environments set up it would take a new hire months to learn all that before we used Chef.
  • We lose some ROI when the Chef server and source control become out of sync.
  • Traditionally, our sysadmins provisioned and configuring new local dev instances. But by handing off non-production configuration automation to DevOps, we get things done faster.

Alternatives Considered

Ansible, Puppet Enterprise (formerly Puppet Data Center Automation) and Puppet Pipelines (formerly Distelli)

Other Software Used

Liferay Digital Experience Platform (DXP), SAP Commerce Cloud (formerly SAP Hybris), Oracle Service Bus

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