Chef Reviews

Our primary use case of this solution is for the orchestration of the service deployment, and integrations. Earlier, we had it on-prem but now it's totally on AWS cloud. AWS cloud is easier to use, and changing and refitting the architecture solutions is very easy.

This solution has improved my organization in the way that deployment has become very quick and orchestration is easy. If we have thousands of servers we can easily deploy in a small amount of time. We can deploy the applications or any kind of announcements in much less time. 

We started using the AWS services, for example, Opsware. Whatever recipes we have written in SAP, we can use the same recipe in Opsware. Moving from one to the other is almost no work.

The most valuable features for us would be the writing of the recipes. Any business can write the recipe based on their deployment, it's not like we have to follow a specific path. 

AWS Marketplace gives you a sense of authentic products. Since AWS does its own checks on the marketplace products it's kind of a sense of relief that something will not be problematic.

I would rate this solution a nine because our use case and whatever we need is there. Ten out of ten is perfect. We have to go to IOD and stuff so they should consider things like this  to make it a ten.

It's quite stable, we hardly see surprises. Its deployment is very smooth.

We have many applications and each one has its own cluster of the servers. We have more than a hundred servers and a couple of clusters which is a big environment. We use SAP and they help us. 

If we need technical support we raise an AWS ticket and someone from the technical support team helps us. If we hit a roadblock we have to go out beyond AWS support which is fine.

The reason that we chose this solution is because it's more effective and it gives us the ability to do the customization that we would like to do. It's also more versatile in the way that we can deploy using this tool, not only on Cloud but at the same time on-prem as well. It's more powerful.

We see ROI from saving a lot of time and that our deliveries are now on time. Also, we save the amount of time we take to deploy and make any changes in the deployment and in expediting service. The amount of time invested there is less which in turn we can invest in some other work. So our ROI is speed.

I would rate this solution a nine because it's simple, easy to use, more versatile, and most importantly, it can handle the hundred thousand servers at the same time very easily and almost in no time.

It depends on the enterprise need, but I would advise someone considering this solution that if you want to have very heavy or big clusters this is a product you can trust for deployment and it's smooth. You can create your own custom recipe which in other products, I would say is only partially there and depends on the different types of applications. Not all applications have the same deployment and orchestration patterns and most of the SAP deployment credits are covered. 

It is for orchestrating our servers and deployments to do integrations.

Deployment has become quick and orchestration is now easy. If you have thousand of servers, you can easily deploy them in a minimum amount of time. You can deploy applications or any type of announcements in a reduced amount of time.

Writing recipes, which is great. Any business can write a recipe based on their deployment. We do not have to follow a path.

It is simple, easy to use, and versatile. The most important thing is it can handle a 100,000 servers at the same time easily with no time constraints.

Since we are heading to IoT, this product should consider anything related to this.

The product is quite stable. We hardly experience any surprises. Its deployment is very smooth.

We have many applications and each is having its own cluster of the service. We have more than a 100 servers and a couple of clusters. That is a big environment.

If we need help, we raise an AWS ticket. Then, the AWS support helps us with the technical support.

The integration and configuration of this product in our AWS environment was simple.

We are saving a lot our delivery time and on te amount of the time that we deploy. We used to make changes during the deployment. So, the amount of time invested there is less, which in turn, we can invest in some other work. Therefore, our ROI is quick, though it does depend on the size of your service.

Purchasing through the AWS Marketplace was a good place to go to purchase this product because you receive a sense of authenticity with the products. Since AWS has its own checks on AWS Marketplace products, there is sense of relief that the product will not be problematic.

We looked at other product like Puppet. We are also using Ansible. However, Chef is the market leader, so we went with that.

Chef is more effective. It provides the hooks, so we can do customization. The product is more versatile. For example, we can deploy using this tool, not only with cloud, but simultaneously on-premise. So, it is quite powerful.

If someone would like to go for a heavy cluster, this is a product they can trust for deployment, since it is smooth. Even though customization is needed, they can create their own custom recipe, which in other products, I would say is partially there and also depends on the different type of applications. 

We had the solution on on-premise for a year, but now it is completely on AWS Cloud. AWS Cloud is easier to use. We can change the solution by refitting the architecture solution now because it is easy.

We use it for provisioning Adobe Experience Manager web application environments.

It has given us more resiliency in all the stuff we now manage with Chef, which was previously sort of manually maintained. Now, we are able to drive all of that through version control and automation, which is a lot faster.

It has been very easy to tie it into our build and deploy automation for production release work, etc. All the Chef pieces more or less run themselves.

There is a slight barrier to entry if you are used to using Ansible, since it is Ruby-based. However, it is just a different product and requires you to acclimate yourself, just like any other product would.

We have had no stability issues.

The scalability works. We haven't scaled it too high. We have a few different servers in different places. 

We have been looking into the high availability offering, but we haven't actually stood it up yet. We are hopeful about it though.

We have had to open a few Amazon support tickets. However, they have typically not been Chef-related, they have been Amazon service-related.

The technical support has been great. Our tickets have all been closed out quickly.

Our environments used to be on-premise, then we were moving them into the cloud. Since they were big and complicated, we decided we needed a manageable provisioning system instead of doing it by hand every time.

We have seen ROI. It has decreased a lot of man-hours that we were previously spending doing stuff which we now manage with Chef. It has decreased when we have a production issue, since we are able to fix it faster. We also have had less production issues since using Chef to automate our provisioning.

I wasn't involved in the purchasing, but I am pretty sure that we are happy with the current pricing and licensing since it never comes up.

We considered Chef, Puppet, Ansible, and homegrown solutions. We had a couple people who used to use Ansible and some people who had previously used Chef. I think we just settled on Chef after trying it because we liked that it was Ruby-based, and there were a lot of community cookbooks already. This lined up parallel with what we wanted to be doing.

I would recommend Chef. It is very user-friendly. There are a lot of community resources which make it easy to onboard. It also plays nicely with existing automation tools and other things which you are probably already using.

Chef works with Adobe Experience Manager, Terraform, and AWS CLI tools. We have been pleased with the integration.

We have only used the AWS offering.

• For software management
• Competitive deployment
• Upgrade

It is easy to manage on our production systems because there is an agent running on all the servers. When we want to make a change, we just make or publish our changes on the Chef server. So, it is easy to make changes to hundreds of servers in one shot. Instead of doing manually configuration, everything is automated.

Automation is everything. Having so many servers in production, many of our processes won't work nor scale. So, we look for tools to help us automate the process, and Chef is one of them.

Right now, we are moving towards a container department with Docker and Kubernetes, so I'm not sure if Chef has features to support containers. I haven't really researched it yet, but if they can improve their software to support Docker containers, it would be for the best.

The stability is good.

The scalability is great.

Because we're using the open software, we never get a chance to call their support. We just use the community support. 

If you have a question, just upload your questions on the community forum, and ask for answers from there.

The integration and configuration were pretty straight forward. We have automated most of our department processes with Chef. Therefore, whenever there is a new software release ready, we can automatically use Chef to publish it to production. It is very easy to use.

We need to upgrade Chef and Ansible.

We are using the free, open source version of the software, which we are happy with at this time.

We have also used Ansible and Puppet. We have been using Ansible ever since it deployed a Docker containers with Kubernetes. We are also using Kubernetes to help manage our product assistance. 

We have our product integrated with Chef and Ansible. They are not integrated on the same system because we use two different systems. We are not using Puppet anymore.

Chef is a great tool to use. Try to automate your whole department process with Chef, if possible. Also, try to use the same tool across different platforms, so it will be easier to manage.

We use it for deployment of applications. It is a tool that you can use on the back-end for deploying architectures.

I have used the product for a couple years. I used to work for an online data center, and we used Chef for a lot of the tools and appointments.

When you are running a large cluster with hybrid applications, it can be very instrumental in making sure that they are running in sync. The tools it offers for running in environments has made it a good solution to use.

Its most valuable feature is automation.

Third-party innovations need improvement, and I would like to see more integration with other platforms.

We put quite a lot of stress on it, especially in our larger environments.

The scalability is good. I have used it for several environments, from small (a couple of servers) to large clusters more than 50 servers). 

We have seen a lot of ROI. Our customers really enjoy the tool. We are able to save in development time, deployment time, and it makes it easier to manage the environments.

Purchasing the solution from AWS Marketplace was a good experience. AWS's pricing is pretty in line with the product's regular pricing. Though instance-wise, AWS is not the cheapest in the market.

The AWS platform is solid. With the technologies that they offer, it makes it easy to integrate. When you are building environments and your able to integrate everything together, this is good thing.

We looked at a combination of open source and other paid solutions. It was hard because Chef offered many options that others didn't, so it wasn't a one-to-one comparison.

Chef had better functionality, flexibility, and price. It is a clean product that is easy to work with and our customers like the product.

It works well. I would highly recommend it. 

It is a well thought out product which integrates well with what developers and customers are looking for.

The product works well with VMware environments.

I have used the on-premise and AWS versions. It integrates well if you are in AWS environments. However, if you are on-premise, it may not be the best solution.

I have used in my current company for three years, and with other clients for more than ten years.

My clients are happy, which is the most important thing.

The most valuable feature is automation. 

The AWS monitoring, AWS X-Ray, and some other features could be improved.

We have some issues in Brazilian region with stability. However, in US region, we have no issues with stability.

Scalability is pretty good. We have nothing to complain about, except the price.

I would rate the technical support as a ten out of ten.

Amazon is a great partner.

The integration and configuration are pretty good in the AWS environment. The problems are usually on our side, not on AWS' side.

The price is always a problem. It is high. There is room for improvement. I do like purchasing on the AWS Marketplace, but I would like the ability to negotiate and have some flexibility in the pricing on it. 

I don't like some of the products offered by VMware. I like the automation offered by Chef and Puppet.

We chose Chef because some clients have some legacy systems and decided to work with them. We don't really like work with VMs, but when we have to, we use Puppet.

I have used the on-premise and AWS versions. I prefer the AWS for troubleshooting.

It integrates with many products in ILT, data management, and the server areas with each of them providing cloud computing, like EC2 and API Gateway.

We use it for provisioning and ongoing configuration management. We provision boxes with Chef by taking a base AMI that already has Chef installed, and already has the appropriate credentials to connect to the main server. Then, this will be able to roll out and deploy the configuration. In addition, it runs every five minutes, so any unexpected changes to the configuration get automatically reverted. 

This means, you get developers, who go into the box and change something, thinking it will be okay. Then, they come to you, asking "Why isn't this change that I'm making working?" We have to explain, "Because it shouldn't be going into the box in the first place."

One thing that we've been able to do is a tiered permission model, allowing developers and their managers to perform their own operations in lower environments. This means a manager can go in and make changes to a whole environment, whereas a developer with less access may only be able to change individual components or be able to upgrade the version for software that they have control over. This allows us to return some of the control back to the developers, which saves our nights and weekends.

One advantage Chef has over Ansible is your operations can be entirely headless, meaning that they can interact directly with the Chef database using shared credentials. It never uses any type of human-readable interface. Therefore, you don't have to go into a GUI nor use a command line tool. You can hit the database directly with a library.

With Ansible, a lot of the operations require that you have some type of frontward-facing tool in order for it to perform, e.g., command line or a GUI available. For a smaller scale operation, if you're managing fewer than 100 nodes, this might be fine, as it might be more helpful if you can transfer some of the power over to your developers in order to perform certain operations.

However, if you're handy enough with DSL and you can present your own front-facing interface to your developers, then you can actually have a lot more granular control with Chef in operations over what developers can perform and what they can't.

One of the biggest things that I miss is in Chef 11 and earlier, organizations were able to be managed directly through the Chef control command line utility. Now, while we prefer to interact directly with the database, there is still some value in being able to have access to the command line utility. While that functionality is still present and in the documentation, it has been broken since Chef 12. We are now looking at Chef 14, and they already have Chef 15 in the pipeline, but there appears to be no effort to fix this functionality, which is definitely broken, provides a false positive for a result when you perform the operation, and doesn't work.

It would be nice to have an update to Chef Zero, such that it was more geared toward containers. Before Docker took hold, there was something called Chef Zero Vagrant, which was a plugin for Vagrant which would provision your developer's local copies of their environment for local testing. This was great for the technology, but we haven't seen an evolution of it now that the containerization technology has moved forward.

It all seems to be very solid and stable.

We have rolled out around 500 nodes. Part of the reason why we have stuck with it is that it managed to effectively scale with us and stay stable at the same time.

I've contacted them before about the same issues that I have mentioned for improvement. Because Chef is being developed by a hybrid team of open source contributors, as well as the Chef core team, I am not sure my communications have gone to the right people yet.

The integration and configuration of AWS within our environment is a whole other skill set. Any configuration management or infrastructure as code will be a learning curve. Integrating it requires rearchitecting, not necessarily of the design, but certainly of the philosophy by which you approach. That is part of the benefit of it as well, you can develop a new way of thinking among the developers who will assist in producing code, which is automated, scalable, easier to write automated tests for, etc.

I don't know if it can be made easier in the adoption of it, since it is already a significant change, which is a good thing.

When we're rolling out a new server, we're not using the AWS Marketplace AMI, we're using our own AMI, but we are paying them a licensing fee.

We went the AWS route because we are fully cloud-based anyway. It was something that people who came before me were already familiar with, so it was a lot easier for me to get buy-in.

The price per node is a little weird. It doesn't scale along with your organization. If you're truly utilizing Chef to its fullest, then the number of nodes which are being utilized in any particular day might scale or change based on your Auto Scaling groups. How do you keep track of that or audit it? Then, how do you appropriately license it? It's difficult.

All you can do is communicate with them what's happening and get something that you're both comfortable with. However, if you're doing that, then what's the point of having the per-node model in the first place? It would be better to move to a fixed-pricing model.

We have also looked at Ansible, Puppet, and SaltStack. They all sort of have managed solutions which you can potentially purchase. Puppet definitely has a sort of old school thought process working behind it.

Over two to three years, we have not seen a stable release of Salt. They have some good ideas, but it isn't stable enough yet to use in a production environment.

Make sure that the operations crew has a background in Ruby, if you're going to choose Chef. If you have a Python crew, then look at Ansible as a potential option. Because I think they're catching up, and they will surpass Chef in pretty much every way sometime in the next 12 to 18 months.

Though, Chef Automate is still the most reliable solution.

At the top level, it is integrated with Terraform, which is delivering whole entities and groups of nodes. Then, those nodes are individually being provisioned with Chef. The integration is seamless.

I've run my own Chef server before. We've done completely headless with Chef Zero, where we're distributing the code directly to box during provisioning. We've used Chef pretty much every way that it can be used.

The AWS software is good. There is definitely value for somebody who is trying to understand it and be able to have a deployment of it for observation. Coming into it, there's a lot to understand, as with any technology.

If I'm thinking about coming into it now or trying to bring somebody up to speed, it would be good to have an already functioning setup of the server where you can interact with the NoSQL database and  play with some of the tools available to understanding how they work in an AWS instance. It will be very similar to the way Chef Automate works, in general. Therefore, I do see value in it. 

Our primary use case is having the properties set up across the servers. We have Chef recipes deployed and configured across our servers, so we get the same type of replication across our servers and environments.

We are using the on-premise version. We have our applications already set up for on-premise. We are using Chef and preparing it for CI/CD and other properties. Now, we are planning ahead and will use the AWS service too.

Earlier, we used to do everything manually, such as configuring the servers across different environments. Using Chef and Puppet, we can automate our CI/CD process with reduced effort from our DevOps team.

Chef recipes are easy to write and move across different servers and environments. 

They could provide more features, so the recipes could be developed in a simpler and faster way. There is still a lot of room for improvement, providing better functionalities when creating recipes.

We would also like more recipes. This is key for us.

We do put a lot of stress on it from the QA, staging, and servers. We have a CI/CD pipeline continuously running as the developer commits the code to Chef and Puppet, which are always up and running.

The scalability is working well for our organization.

As a developer, I don't use the technical support.

We are still in the process of evaluating Chef Compute. Currently, we use Chef and Puppet. Soon, we will probably be purchasing it from AWS Marketplace.

We were already using Chef and Puppet for most of our DevOps. These were our only choices.

I would definitely recommend using Chef.

Chef integrates and configures well with AWS and other products. We use Chef and Puppet together. We are also using Splunk for log traces. We just started using Chef with AWS for easy to use containers. AWS is great for storage, CloudFormation, and CloudFrond CDN.

We are moving towards the cloud environment with all AWS resources.