We performed a comparison between Chef and Microsoft Azure DevOps 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."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."
"You set it and forget it. You don't have to worry about the reliability or the deviations from any of the other configurations."
"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."
"The product is useful for automating processes."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is automation."
"The scalability of the product is quite nice."
"The most important thing is it can handle a 100,000 servers at the same time easily with no time constraints."
"The available Kanban board is the best feature for management decisions."
"We can forecast tasks and the number of hours a task will take and can compare it with how long a task actually takes."
"Overall, so far we have no major issues to report."
"Detailed logs allow us to pinpoint the exact cause of any issues, making troubleshooting efficient and accurate."
"Azure enables us to create a staging environment through to a production environment in an easier way and then get the code and run that."
"Azure Port is considered the most valuable feature."
"Some of the most valuable features are the ease of use and the ability to monitor a lot of things. It has a lot of applications and facilities that meet all the developers' requirements. For example, we can use application insights to get an idea of our application's performance. Since it's cloud-based, it's really good for collaboration and working as a team."
"The initial setup process is easy."
"If they can improve their software to support Docker containers, it would be for the best."
"Since we are heading to IoT, this product should consider anything related to this."
"Third-party innovations need improvement, and I would like to see more integration with other platforms."
"The AWS monitoring, AWS X-Ray, and some other features could be improved."
"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."
"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."
"There is a slight barrier to entry if you are used to using Ansible, since it is Ruby-based."
"The user management in the solution could improve."
"We are facing some problems because the capacity can only be measured within a project. It cannot be measured across multiple projects. So, the reporting needs to be enhanced, and there should be more graphs to be able to easily give the upper management insights about all the employees from different departments. It will be helpful for employee management. Currently, the managers over here are using Power BI for insights because the functionality of Azure DevOps Boards is not enough. So, we have to export the data into another visualization tool and get the results."
"Being more technology-agnostic through ease of integration would be beneficial."
"I think that they have some menus there that are not very well placed."
"I can't think of anything I would like to improve, since I don't have complete knowledge of the platform yet. I'm sure that as I gain more experience, I will understand it better. The price could maybe be cheaper, but I'm sure I'll have more ideas as to improvements and additional features once I've used it more."
"When we don't have some permissions, we have to research how to get them."
"Reporting could be better. We would like to see how many applications are onboarded in DevOps and in which phase they are. We would like to know for how many applications we have done only the repository, but we have not yet done the build pipeline or deploy pipeline. Currently, there is no such report. We have to figure it out ourselves. There is no way to check how many applications are completing their build pipelines, how many applications are completing their deploy pipeline, how many are ready to use, and how many pipelines are working."
"One thing I would note is that it's hard to know what is included or not in the product. Especially when you begin to try and compare it to other solutions. When you go to a site like VersionOne, they tell you Azure DevOps doesn't have this or that, and when you go to Microsoft, it says VersionOne doesn't have this or that. They could do a better job of laying out exactly what is on offer so customers know going in exactly what they'll get."
Chef is ranked 15th in Release Automation with 18 reviews while Microsoft Azure DevOps is ranked 1st in Release Automation with 127 reviews. Chef is rated 8.0, while Microsoft Azure DevOps is rated 8.2. 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 Microsoft Azure DevOps writes "Allows us to deploy code to production without releasing certain features immediately and agile project management capabilities offer resource-leveling". Chef is most compared with Jenkins, AWS Systems Manager, Microsoft Configuration Manager, SaltStack and BigFix, whereas Microsoft Azure DevOps is most compared with GitLab, Jira, TFS, Rally Software and ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management. See our Chef vs. Microsoft Azure DevOps report.
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