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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
7.5
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
Build Automation (20th), Release Automation (11th), Configuration Management (18th)
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer895359 - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Aaron  P - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy configuration management, optimization abilities, and complete infrastructure and application automation
In terms of improvement, Chef could get better by being more widely available, adapting to different needs, and providing better documentation. There is also an issue with shared resources like cookbooks lacking context, which could lead to problems when multiple companies use them. Chef should aim for wider availability, better flexibility, clearer documentation, and improved management of shared resources to prevent conflicts. Many companies are now moving to Ansible, so I would recommend better documentation, easier customer use, and simpler integration. I have concerns about the complexity of migrating to different servers and would prefer a simpler process.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Self-service for developers, because they are able to deploy to development departments on their own, without needing people from operations."
"It is an umbrella system that allows us to integrate many different systems into our heterogeneous environment."
"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."
"Gives people insight into what's happening during the deployment."
"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."
"The event monitor is very good. You can monitor when the file is created so you can pick up the file once it's done."
"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."
"It provides a wonderful user interface which is easy to use."
"It is a well thought out product which integrates well with what developers and customers are looking for."
"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."
"Chef recipes are easy to write and move across different servers and environments."
"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 most important thing is it can handle a 100,000 servers at the same time easily with no time constraints."
"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."
"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."
"The solution is easy to use and learn, and it easily automates all the code and infrastructure."
 

Cons

"Not a perfect ten because the user interface is brand new and it needs improvement."
"One of the biggest features I've been asked by my team to put in there is opening more scripting languages to be part of the platform. There is a little bit of a learning curve in learning how to code some of the workflows in Automic at this time. If widely used languages like Perl and Python were integrated, on top of what's already there, the proprietary language, it would make it easier to on-board new resources."
"key thing is support for cloud-based deployment. That is lacking."
"The dashboard should allow you to see the current state of packages in each environment, not only on an individual application basis, but across the entire application platform."
"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 stability of the solution can be improved."
"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."
"I would like to see more support for WebSphere."
"Since we are heading to IoT, this product should consider anything related to this."
"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."
"Support and pricing for Chef could be improved."
"If only Chef were easier to use and code, it would be used much more widely by the community."
"Vertical scalability is still good but the horizontal, adding more technologies, platforms, tools, integrations, Chef should take a look into that."
"I would also like to see more analytics and reporting features. Currently, the analytics and reporting features are limited. I'll have to start building my own custom solution with Power BI or Tableau or something like that. If it came with built-in analytics and reporting features that would be great."
"I would like to see more security features for Chef and more automation."
"In the future, Chef could develop a docker container or docker images."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"We increased our quality and reduced our time costs."
"I can save time and money more quickly."
"Customers often complain about the price."
"Chef is priced based on the number of nodes."
"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."
"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 using the free, open source version of the software, which we are happy with at this time."
"Pricing for Chef is high."
"We are able to save in development time, deployment time, and it makes it easier to manage the environments."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
16%
Retailer
9%
Educational Organization
6%
 

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 Business2
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise12
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What do you like most about Chef?
Chef is a great tool for an automation person who wants to do configuration management with infrastructure as a code.
What needs improvement with Chef?
Chef does not support the containerized things of Chef products. In the future, Chef could develop a docker container or docker images.
 

Also Known As

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

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BET365, Charter Communications, TASC
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