Chef Reviews

• 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 integration management.

The community.

The agent on the server sometimes acts finicky. 

It is stable most of the time. There hasn't been any downtime.

We did not go with the traditional architecture, so we decided to use the AWS systems by decoupling the traditional architecture.

The scalability of the product is quite nice. We have deployed it across six to seven organizations.

The technical support is very good.

The integration and configuration in our AWS environment is very good.

It works well with most operation management systems, and where it doesn't, we upgrade the system.

We have seen ROI.

We tried Ansible and Jenkins. However, because we use Terraform in our products, these weren't the most fitting solutions. Chef was the best solution for helping us build our infrastructure.

Find use cases and do your research.

We only use the AWS version. We tried the other versions, but we found that they were lacking in functionality.

We use it for training.

All the Chef enthusiasts who come to us to learn and train, improve their skillsets to get jobs. It's a really easy product in AWS. It's easy to teach and easy to understand.

The most valuable feature is the language that it uses: Ruby.

Regarding integration and configuration of the product, they're pretty manageable. The layers are really easy to configure.

I would like to see more security features for Chef and more automation.

It's working great. It's stable. We try to produce real-world scenarios with the students as much as possible.

 It's a really easy product in AWS. It's easy to teach and easy to understand.

We considered Puppet and Ansible. We went with Chef because Chef uses Ruby and Ruby is pretty popular right now.

Compare it to the other services that you use.

Everything can always be improved. If you have a specific need in configuration management and integration, Chef is a great product, especially with AWS.