105 Progress Chef Reviews
Overall Review Sentiment for Progress Chef
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The Chef DK allows you to have a full CI/CD workflow for your infrastructure as code. With chef you can stick to the community cookbooks and boilerplate resources or you can make it do anything you like with raw ruby. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
As everyone says it can be a bit daunting to get started. Most new development seems to be targeted at enterprises. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
I like chef because it uses DSL for configuration instead of XML, Rackspace supports it very well, etc. However the absolute best thing about Chef is the concept of recipes where you can get your platform up and configured extremely easily if that platform has a chef recipe. In addition most large platforms do have chef recipes so it's great! Also, I like that it;s open source Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Some of the things i dislike about chef, and this might jkust be a criticism of configuration management in general, is that you need pretty much a full team to support it. Sometimes I feel like it adds more complexity instead of kless. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
IT infrastructure can be saved /reused as when required. Less time to create infrastructure Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Difficult to learn the language for beginners Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
The ability to code infrastructure and then run it in action from a single line command is amazing. Imagine spinning up not just 1, but an entire stack of services at once (a whole ecosystem). That's the power of Chef. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
The problems are myriad. Chef does not have an easy way to pick up for beginners. Most cookbooks are focused on Linux, not Windows. And whenever a deployment breaks, tracing it is a huge pain as there stacktrace is not very informative. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Chef provides tools for for IT automation and after trying other tools. Its a master client model and is based in Ruby which was really helpful since we were also developing applications in Ruby on Rails.
The best thing about chef is the collection of modules and configuration recipes. Also, its based around Git which everyone is familiar with and 'Knife' tool is very helpful during installations. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Learning curve is steep but since we were already using Ruby it was a bit easy for us. Apart from that, its a not a smiple tool, It can lead to very large code bases and complicated environments quickly. One needs to be aware of that. Also, it doesn't support push functionality which other alternatives does.
Chef documentation can also be a little sketchy from time to time. They are more focused on making it work than writing documentations and doesn't provide as much platform support as other alternatives does. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Previously to deploy a large application was suffering, always happened several problems. When I met Chef (while studying the vagrant) quickly deployed in my company. Chef is able to handle EVERYTHING related to creation of a dynamic infrastructure Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Nothing, all in Chef is exquisite, even the price is right. Of course you will have to study hard for put the tool into production, but it is a study that will be worth it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Chef is pretty solid for configuration management of Windows machines and ensuring that they are all setup and provisioned the same way. The setup and scripting of recipes is pretty extensive, and Windows support is solid. There are a variety of recipes to do most windows configuration needed, as well as Linux. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
The setup is pretty complex, it can take awhile to just setup a server and figure out how to connect a client to it. It would be nice to have more functionality exposed in the Chef GUI, using command line for a majority of tasks can be tedious at times. Chef is mainly geared toward ensuring a server is configured properly, but it would be nice to have the option for 'one off' tasks. When you have agents already running on your systems for Chef it would be nice to run a task on a subset of machines instead of yet another agent and management system for that. It also runs best if you have a person dedicated to the configuration and on going maintenance of Chef. It takes some effort to keep up on your recipes. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
