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Chef pros and cons

Vendor: Chef

4.0 out of 5

19 reviews
95% willing to recommend

655 followers

Pros & Cons summary

Chef is stable and scalable, capable of handling increased loads by upgrading specific resources. Installation is straightforward, ensuring quick setup and deployment. Chef excels in compliance management and provides comprehensive automation for infrastructure and application management, optimizing configuration tasks. While support, pricing, and role-based access management could improve, future enhancements could include better availability, improved documentation, and developing Docker containers or images.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Chef is stable and scalable for managing configurations and automation.

It is easy to install and excels in compliance features.

Chef facilitates easy management of configurations and optimization capabilities, alongside complete infrastructure and application automation.

It allows for effective automation of processes.

Chef is highly beneficial for automation professionals focusing on infrastructure as code.

CONS

Support and pricing for Chef could be improved.

Managing role-based access could be enhanced.

Chef could get better by being more widely available and providing better documentation.

It is an old technology.

Chef could develop a docker container or docker images in the future.

Chef Pros review quotes

WW

Lead DevOps Engineer at General Assembly

Dec 5, 2018

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.

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MS

Senior Operations Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

Dec 11, 2018

You set it and forget it. You don't have to worry about the reliability or the deviations from any of the other configurations.

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Principal Architect at Brillio

Aug 2, 2018

I wanted to monitor a hybrid cloud environment, one using AWS and Azure. If I have to provision/orchestrate between multiple cloud platforms, I can use Chef as a one-stop solution, to broker between those cloud platforms and orchestrate around them, rather than going directly into each of the cloud-vendors' consoles.

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IH

Manager at ZS Associates

Dec 10, 2018

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.

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TR

Engineer II at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

Dec 11, 2018

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.

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AC

Primary Architect at Autodesk, Inc.

Dec 9, 2018

The most important thing is it can handle a 100,000 servers at the same time easily with no time constraints.

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Presales Consultant - Solution Architect at Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Apr 10, 2022

Stable and scalable configuration management and automation tool. Installing it is easy. Its most valuable feature is its compliance, e.g. it's very good.

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SN

Director at CenturyLink

Dec 11, 2018

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

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DevOps Director at Aerohive

Dec 11, 2018

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.

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SA

Sharath Annabathina

Senior Software Engineer at BMS

Dec 5, 2018

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

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Show 9 more reviews (out of 19)

Chef Cons review quotes

WW

Lead DevOps Engineer at General Assembly

Dec 5, 2018

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.

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MS

Senior Operations Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

Dec 11, 2018

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.

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Principal Architect at Brillio

Aug 2, 2018

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.

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IH

Manager at ZS Associates

Dec 10, 2018

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.

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TR

Engineer II at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

Dec 11, 2018

There is a slight barrier to entry if you are used to using Ansible, since it is Ruby-based.

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AC

Primary Architect at Autodesk, Inc.

Dec 9, 2018

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

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Presales Consultant - Solution Architect at Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Apr 10, 2022

Support and pricing for Chef could be improved.

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SN

Director at CenturyLink

Dec 11, 2018

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

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DevOps Director at Aerohive

Dec 11, 2018

If they can improve their software to support Docker containers, it would be for the best.

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SA

Sharath Annabathina

Senior Software Engineer at BMS

Dec 5, 2018

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.

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Show 8 more reviews (out of 18)

Product Categories

Product Categories

Configuration Management

Build Automation

Release Automation

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See all alternatives

Product Categories

Product Categories

Configuration Management

Build Automation

Release Automation

Popular Comparisons

Popular Comparisons

Microsoft Intune vs Chef

Microsoft Configuration Manager vs Chef

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs Chef

VMware Aria Automation vs Chef

Red Hat Satellite vs Chef

AWS Systems Manager vs Chef

BMC TrueSight Server Automation vs Chef

Puppet Enterprise vs Chef

AWS CloudFormation vs Chef

CFEngine Enterprise vs Chef

See all alternatives

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