Progress Chef Reviews & Product Details - Page 9

Simplifies bootstrapping fleets of servers and managing required packages. Allows developers to build upon a library of packages from other developers so they don't need to start at the basics from scratch and can more quickly and easily start on the parts that really matter Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Very difficult and time consuming to set up and get started with; large learning curve; compatibility issues with little to no documentation Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I have been using Chef as it helps me to automate my applications in configuring and getting deployed in my web network easily.

It has got various features such as Chef Management console, Chef Analytics, and Client Reporting. It helps me to keep my server up all the time and saves up a lot of time in this area.

It also allows me to keep the track of my applications in terms of version control. So, the applications remains in synchronization with the help of different versions available for each built. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The setup document and tutorials could have been a little better. They have provided all the documentation in a single web page with no references to any external links. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The shear amount that you can do with the product from Linux to Windows, configurations to application deployments, Chef is delightfully AWESOME!!!!! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I personally don't have any dislikes for Chef as a product. The only caveat is when creating resources, you'll need to increase your Ruby knowledge and skills. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Chef is a standard in automated deployment. Is used in Facebook and it's really REALLY powerful. It's a very serious thing about deployment automation and it's capabilities are huge. Maintains states (software, configuration...) of the entire cluster, and I'm talking about hundreds of nodes. Cookbooks are very popular and you can find them to do almost everything in the open source community. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Chef is terribly complex to deploy by itself, not only needs a Chef Server that internally will install a RabbitMQ, a SQL database, a Nginx... it can really take a lot of resources of your machine.

Not only this, you need to install a daemon, Chef Client, on each Chef node you want to manage. Of course if this Client fails... your node is "lost" for Chef and you cannot manage it anymore until you restart the client. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Chef is one of my favorite tools lately. It makes painful and risky deployments easy and fast. Chef is also providing a quite flexible infrastructure which lets you to manage many nodes easily. You can simply integrate your other DevOps practices with Chef. It helps you to understand your infrastructure better and minifies security risks before your service goes down. Definetely Chef is a great tool to minimize your downtime. I'm a Ruby developer and Chef has a good support for both Ruby and Rails environments. Also Chef recipes written with Ruby, which is time saving for me. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Hosted and premium versions are more expensive than I can afford. Also management console, analytics and high availability features are not included in free version. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Awesome documentation & training resources given by the Chef are easily understandable.I have used only the opensource and free versions of chef-solo (except for the trail period) in all the organisations I have worked with till now.I use chef in conjunction with vagrant to improve & automate the stuff in development life cycle.Librarian-chef is most useful bundler plugin for chef based infrastructure which one must try automates the things with simple commands.

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They divided the Chef tool into three categories for the sake of business which is very disappointing

1. Hosted Chef

2. Enterprise (On-Premise Version)

3. Opensource Version which comes with less add-on and no support

Though there is a vast community present who are using chef for businesses it tuff to rely on opensource chef unless we have very experienced professionals.Pricing disappoints me a lot being a small organisation.Chef commitment to opensource is still doubtful which is an scary thing. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The ability to manage multiple environments easily. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The domain specific language has a couple of small quirks. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Open Source

Community support.

Documentation is great.

Well written Chef blogs to understand steps and procedure.

Automated deployment of application in a farm.

Availability of well written cookbooks.

Ease of development with just enough knowledge of Ruby. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Installation should be made little faster.

knife-plugins support is less

Some of the cookbooks are not maintained.. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There are plenty of well written, documented and supported Chef recipes for dealing with all sorts of server automation, like users management, database management, Solr configuration, full application stack configuration (Sensu, Gitorious, Redmine), SSH, and many more commonly used software. All of them are open-source and have plenty of customization options. Chef itself has good documentation.

Dependencies management is very easy and robust by using librarian-chef.

Chef's verbose mode is very helpful when debugging what a recipe is doing and there's also a dry runner mode which won't actually run anything in the server, which is also helpful in some cases.

Unlike Puppet there's no domain specific language to learn, which is a big advantage for me. You only have to learn a bit of Ruby, which is an easy language to learn and use and you are able to perform any logic pretty easily when compared with Puppet which is quite limiting when you need some custom logic which is not handled by their DSL and you are forced to extend their DSL.

Chef can be configured through an specialized server that will orchestrate all managed servers or they can be used without setting up any Chef server, through chef-solo. Chef-solo can be integrated with Vagrant as well to help setting up a development environment very quickly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I'd prefer Chef's focused on chef-solo for most of its beginning tutorials as I find it the easier mode to start with and also the most useful one for most small organizations. The fact that chef-solo is not the tutorials assume makes it harder for a beginner to understand how it works.

I also think they could be more backwards compatible in new releases. I remember it took me quite a while to fix some old recipes I had so that it would work in newer Chef releases...

They use JIRA to manage their tickets and I really don't like JIRA. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I won't state how much I like chef due to its automation, but I'd like to say that in comparison with puppet and ansible, it gives better control as it allows you to "develop" your system. The dependencies system that's out of the box due to Ruby is really good! As a vagrant only user, chef-zero was the product that I really needed! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

- I have to write ruby

- As a vagrant user, it feels it has quite some overhead when the system bootstraps

- It takes more time to write something "quick and dirty", while ansible performs better for MVP cases

- As a vagrant user, it feels ugly the way I have to manage my secret files, databags are not the best case Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.