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Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL] vs Chef comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Automic Continuous Delivery...
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Chef
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
Build Automation (12th), Release Automation (5th), Configuration Management (12th)
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer895359 - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Project Engineer at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees
Automatic installation for complex deployments and environments, with good workflow support
I like that really complex deployments are possible with it. It's very good. You have everything you need. You can design your workflows for your needs. You can do so much more, it's not just an automatic installation tool. It's a real deployment tool. I can do the complete deployment with everything that is possible.
Walter Ochieng Odhiambo - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer and Tester at Safaricom
Automation has transformed daily infrastructure work and now frees teams to focus on new challenges
One thing that Chef needs to improve on is making it available in as many languages as possible. There should be a focus on how to make it understandable, not just to infrastructure people, but also to those working in monitoring. How can we ensure that it is part of their daily input? That is something that still has a small missing link. We are almost there, but it can help us achieve outcomes in the future in terms of objectives, not just workflows and visibility. How can we make real-time interactive dashboards more available? Look at what kind of tools can be integrated with them, not just working with the ones like Chef Kitchen and Habitat, but trying to make it even more flexible than what we have right now. On support, I think there should be more focus on how we can achieve AI automations in answering questions for beginners and addressing deep concerns without general manual management.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"We increased our quality and reduced our time costs."
"It provides a wonderful user interface which is easy to use."
"I would say our headwind, or our time to market, is reduced considerably. We get more consistent results out of it, because you write one time and once it's automated you expect it to behave the same way every time. And it cut down a lot of re-work for us."
"It is an umbrella system that allows us to integrate many different systems into our heterogeneous environment."
"Deployment workflow (WF) can be designed this way, so that it is not necessary to provide all applications (systems) artifacts of which an application consists."
"Gives people insight into what's happening during the deployment."
"I think on a day-to-day basis, it has increased the capacity to deploy. We don't have to wait for someone to do something."
"The main benefit is you can deploy everything with it."
"We have seen a lot of ROI, our customers really enjoy the tool, and we are able to save in development time and deployment time, making it easier to manage the environments."
"It is a well thought out product which integrates well with what developers and customers are looking for."
"Deployment has become quick and orchestration is now easy."
"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 is easy to manage on our production systems because there is an agent running on all the servers."
"You set it and forget it. You don't have to worry about the reliability or the deviations from any of the other configurations."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is automation."
 

Cons

"Stability-wise I think it still needs to be improved; performance-wise. It crashes from time to time."
"If you have a technical problem and need development of the tool, the support team is terrible, because they cannot help with the technical details."
"We hope that we can integrate the new CD Directive into our portfolio, so we can bring the deployment and release management closer together."
"key thing is support for cloud-based deployment. That is lacking."
"I would like to see more support for WebSphere."
"At the moment, the version that we are using (version 12.0), the environment is complex with multiple installations. Therefore, the monitoring is not scalable, but this should be improved in 12.1 and 12.2."
"There needs to be better error handling and error descriptions. It should be more clear what the errors are and what we can do to fix them."
"The first time setup can be very complicated."
"In terms of revenue, I have not observed much because it is holistically depending on the project."
"It is an old technology."
"The AWS monitoring, AWS X-Ray, and some other features could be improved."
"The agent on the server sometimes acts finicky."
"If only Chef were easier to use and code, it would be used much more widely by the community."
"However, if you are on-premise, it may not be the best solution."
"I would rate this solution a nine because our use case and whatever we need is there. Ten out of ten is perfect."
"Chef has a very steep learning curve, especially for beginners."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Customers often complain about the price."
"We increased our quality and reduced our time costs."
"I can save time and money more quickly."
"If you have a fixed contract, it has limits to spreading out. If you have a flexible enterprise license contract, then you have a lot of scalability for this tool."
"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."
"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."
"Pricing for Chef is high."
"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."
"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."
"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 are using the free, open source version of the software, which we are happy with at this time."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Comms Service Provider
11%
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Retailer
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise9
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise19
 

Questions from the Community

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Chef?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that we sidestepped it by using Cinc because none of the functionality that is exclusive to the paid version was actually in use in the orga...
What needs improvement with Chef?
I would add that Ruby is a domain-specific language in the Chef dialect, which is a learning curve, but so is Terraform and so is Ansible. The only feedback would be if they could come up with an i...
What is your primary use case for Chef?
My main use case for Chef is configuration and deployments. We receive blank servers and use Chef to build predefined application or appliance servers. A quick specific example of how I use Chef to...
 

Also Known As

CA Continuous Delivery Automation, Automic Release Automation, Automic ONE Automation, UC4 Automation Platform
No data available
 

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