We performed a comparison between Chef and Spinnaker based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Release Automation solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The scalability of the product is quite nice."
"Chef is a great tool for an automation person who wants to do configuration management with infrastructure as a code."
"There is a good community around the product that makes troubleshooting possible."
"The most valuable feature of Spinnaker is the rollback."
"Third-party innovations need improvement, and I would like to see more integration with other platforms."
"The time that it takes in terms of integration. Cloud integration is comparatively easy, but when it comes to two-link based integrations - like trying to integrate it with any monitoring tools, or maybe some other ticketing tools - it takes longer. That is because most of the out-of-the-box integration of the APIs needs some revisiting."
"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."
"There appears to be no effort to fix the command line utility functionality, which is definitely broken, provides a false positive for a result when you perform the operation, and doesn't work."
"It is an old technology."
"If they can improve their software to support Docker containers, it would be for the best."
"I would like them to add database specific items, configuration items, and migration tools. Not necessarily on the builder side or the actual setup of the system, but more of a migration package for your different database sets, such as MongoDB, your extenders, etc. I want to see how that would function with a transition out to AWS for Aurora services and any of the RDBMS packages."
"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."
"Log-wise, we need to understand why something has failed so that we can understand and try to fix it the moment the issue is reported. The solution could use more robust monitoring."
"Spinnaker's configuration setup is too complicated and should be made easy."
Chef is ranked 15th in Release Automation with 18 reviews while Spinnaker is ranked 7th in Release Automation with 2 reviews. Chef is rated 8.0, while Spinnaker is rated 9.6. The top reviewer of Chef writes "Easy configuration management, optimization abilities, and complete infrastructure and application automation". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Spinnaker writes "Good integrations, a helpful user community, and good reliability". Chef is most compared with Jenkins, AWS Systems Manager, Microsoft Azure DevOps, Microsoft Configuration Manager and SaltStack, whereas Spinnaker is most compared with Microsoft Azure DevOps, AWS CodeDeploy, UrbanCode Deploy and Octopus Deploy. See our Chef vs. Spinnaker report.
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