Chef Reviews

I used Chef for server provisioning in AWS using the knife-aws plugin.

I also used Chef as a configuration management tool. It did all the setup and configuration for all the software packages for multiple servers. To make any updates to the server setups, all we did was update the recipes on the Chef Server.

Manual deployments came to a halt completely. Server provisioning became lightning fast. Chef-docker enabled us to have fewer sets of source code for different purposes. Configuration management was a breeze and all the servers were as good as immutable servers.

Configuration management is the most useful feature and is used by everyone. Provisioning is also an important feature. Since Chef collects a lot of inventory using Ohai, the inventory can also be used to integrate with third-party tools.

Although deployment can be done a lot better with other tools on the market, Chef also accomplishes this. However, remember that rollback can be problematic here.

In my presentation to SAP engineering, Ansible was chosen over Chef by all the admins for one reason: simplicity. If only Chef were easier to use and code, it would be used much more widely by the community.

Chef is an extremely amazing tool and has been extensively developed in the last couple of years. There are tons of plugins and integrations available for it, my favorite being the Chef-docker plugin.

I started with Chef as a QA engineer and wrote some beginner level recipes for some easy setups on AWS. I then worked on a bank project where I used the knife-vcloud plugin for Chef to automate provisioning for VMware vCloud. I did some initial evaluation, comparing Chef and Ansible for SAP to automate deployment on bare metal. In some recent projects, I wrote Chef recipes for deployment automation. I integrated it with Fabric/Python. 

I would definitely rate Chef an eight out of 10. Although Chef is easy to code, it still has a little learning curve, since you need to know Ruby.

Chef is a configuration management tool, and I work for the product team of Chef. All the DevOps teams mainly use Chef for configuration management of their servers or infrastructure.

Chef is a great tool for an automation person who wants to do configuration management with infrastructure as a code.

Chef does not support the containerized things of Chef products. In the future, Chef could develop a docker container or docker images.

I have been using Chef for four years.

I rate Chef a nine out of ten for stability.

Thousands of customers are using the solution.

I rate Chef a nine out of ten for scalability.

The solution's technical support team is really good, and you can directly contact them regarding any issues.

Positive

The solution's initial setup for clients is very easy, but it is moderate for the infra server. The solution's documentation is very good, and its installation can be done in 15 to 20 minutes.

Chef is priced based on the number of nodes.

Overall, I rate Chef a nine out of ten.

We were using the tool for managing Kubernetes.

The product is useful for automating processes.

I did not like the solution. It is an old technology. Compared to Ansible, it just doesn't hold up because we need to deploy a client to each of the services we need to manage, which makes the automation much harder.

The tool was fairly stable.

The product was deployed on the cloud.

I would not recommend the solution to others. It depends entirely on how someone’s system is made, but still, I would probably suggest something else entirely. Overall, I rate the tool a four or five out of ten.