Share your experience using Plutora

My main use case for Chef is configuration management to set up systems, provision software, and keep configurations up to date.

I create Chef recipes for setup and install needed software from a clean Linux installation to set up server roles, which is a specific example of how I use Chef to manage and provision software while keeping configurations up to date.

The best features Chef offers include configuration management and server-client setup, along with the ability to coordinate with Chef servers to keep servers up to date automatically and remove any configuration drift from the system automatically.

Chef handles configuration drift automatically by having Chef client contact Chef server, retrieve needed recipes and variables set up for a specific server, verify the current server state with the required state and configuration, and automatically make changes if needed.

Chef has created much faster procedures for system setup and rollout of infrastructure in my organization, as well as for scaling and ensuring that all servers are configured identically. It has removed the possibility of human error from configuration. Plus, it ensures that all servers for specific roles have an identical setup, which makes debugging much easier, along with performance optimization and security measures.

I do not have anything in mind at this time for how Chef could be improved.

I have been using Chef for approximately five years.

I chose a rating of seven because Chef is a great tool, but sometimes resource consumption is quite large, and it requires server-side setup, which is not required but should be considered if you are using server-client plus server. Server size actually depends on the number of clients, and you need to consider this during your setup.

My advice to others looking into using Chef is to be ready to learn Ruby at least on a basic level. I have never used AI in Chef. I gave this product a rating of seven.

Akuity Platform is our main platform for CI/CD, as all deployment and everything is done on Akuity Platform for our whole product.

We use Akuity Platform daily. I am on the software side, but I have also worked with it, mostly observing DevOps people working on Akuity Platform. They configure new features on Akuity Platform, and on a day-to-day basis, whenever there is any change in our product, the CI/CD gets triggered, and that is how we use it daily.

In our case, having a great UI on Akuity Platform is something that we love. We have also used the open-source version, but Akuity Platform, the paid version, has a very great UI and user experience through which we can easily do whatever we want to, and that is what I love most about Akuity Platform.

The UI and user experience of Akuity Platform is better than the open-source version because the open-source version has only the bare minimum on the UI, but in Akuity Platform, they have almost all the features that we want. I have seen that on the open-source version, for the source we just give the GitHub link where the Argo CD workflow is specified, but on the UI of Akuity Platform, we connect our organization there, and they give all the options for the projects that we want to tag on, so that is one of the features that I love on Akuity Platform version.

Overall, Akuity Platform has impacted our organization positively as the DevOps team is quite happy because first, they do not have to manage their own Argo CD, and second, it is quite user-friendly for them as well as for the developers, saving time for us. For the DevOps folks using Akuity Platform, they have saved a good amount of time considering they do not have to deploy Argo CD and they just get everything working, so that is quite helpful.

In our case with Akuity Platform, we observed that we required less time due to the DevOps team needing less time to manage things, so for us, it was a time saving.

Akuity Platform has most of the features, but I think they should include some more features, such as the feature where we specify the URLs of the Argo CD workflow, which I liked, but it would be good if they include more of those features on the platform.

Integration with Akuity Platform is quite good as they have integrations with almost all the related CI/CD products, but I think in terms of performance, they can improve upon that because sometimes it does get laggy, maybe due to high pressure, and anything can be the reason for that, but they can improve on the performance part.

We have been using Akuity Platform for around three years now.

Akuity Platform is stable for our team. Till now, we have not faced any downtime.

Akuity Platform handles scalability well and can handle growth and changes in our workloads easily.

Customer support for Akuity Platform is quite good as they are really helpful whenever we get stuck.

We were using the open-source version earlier, but we found that it was taking quite an amount of time for us to manage, which was a constraint, so we switched to Akuity Platform to avoid management and just use it directly.

I think the pricing of Akuity Platform is a bit high, and we have a budget constraint at our company, but I think it was worth the price that we pay to get it working.

Before choosing Akuity Platform, we evaluated another CI/CD tool called Flux CD, which we found useful, but it was not that helpful in our case, so we just went with Akuity Platform.

I would rate the customer support of Akuity Platform on a scale of one to ten as an eight. Akuity Platform team is really helpful, so there is not much difference there. My overall rating for Akuity Platform is eight.