Chef PAYG

I use Chef  day-to-day to manage infrastructure, create version control, and automate deployment for applications that are ready for deployment and that my team and other teams work on. I work to manage this capability and deploy as fast as possible in a scalable and automated manner, working with people across the organization to achieve a common infrastructure, scalability, and security upgrades for that infrastructure.

The specific task that I worked with for Chef  involves managing up to 70 servers across the organization to deploy applications that my team or other teams develop. This has given me experience deploying applications, understanding the infrastructure as it works, automating processes thoroughly, and monitoring as the application scales up and down. Chef has given us an easy time doing all that automation, security, and monitoring by automating the processes across all those servers so that we don't do manual work, going one place at a time to install updates. If a server goes down across availability zones, we don't have to go and do it manually or troubleshoot along. We automate most of the tasks that we need to do using Chef.

In terms of time, the reduction in manual work is significant. A whole day of 12 hours is now reduced to less than 30 minutes, depending on what we are doing. Once you have the code, you can always copy and reuse it somewhere as long as you know what you are doing. In terms of security configurations, we monitor all servers in various availability zones. We look at how we can automate this in our infrastructure such that once we detect something is coming up, we can patch all servers at once. This reduces our concentration on repetitive tasks and allows us to focus more on delivering availability to the customers and company resources.

This has brought employee happiness, with developers saying that the work environment with available servers and infrastructures has improved by approximately 90 percent. We used to work with people on the sites who continually monitored servers and deployed servers. Now we deploy servers and then we wait while we automate using Chef and monitor those which are about to fail. We monitor them and create scripts to change how they operate, take some down, bring some up, and do load balancing when we need to start a load balancer, without physically having somebody do that every single day unless it is necessary.

This has given the organization an ability to focus more on new challenges that come in, not doing the mundane tasks of every day of infrastructure development. We save more on money in terms of time and also in terms of security applications, deployment, and bringing our infrastructure up. The reduction in employees needed means we don't have to recruit more. We look at those who are there, allowing them to save time to focus on themselves, improve, and learn more about how to make their infrastructure better every day.

Chef offers various features including a unified dashboard, compliance reporting, continuous delivery, and role-based access. The key features that stand out for me are agent scanning, auditing, and portability. With portability, you can easily pick what you have automated instead of trying again to work within another set of nodes. You have that ability to manage all your principles in the cookbook without moving everything from one place to another. You can use the concept of agentless deployment where you just install the Chef agent and then you can use the client. It can monitor what is going on on the servers and then it can report back for you to monitor. Even if you have various availability zones, you can monitor as one in a unified dashboard.

Security is a key aspect that Chef can automate, monitor new features that are available, and even do patches without you getting involved. The features that stand out for me are security as a key one and the work of a unified dashboard that is cross-platform. Chef allows you to write a declarative language using Ruby. These features exemplify the industrial standards that are there and have made my daily work as easy as possible.

One thing that Chef needs to improve on is making it available in as many languages as possible. There should be a focus on how to make it understandable, not just to infrastructure people, but also to those working in monitoring. How can we ensure that it is part of their daily input? That is something that still has a small missing link. We are almost there, but it can help us achieve outcomes in the future in terms of objectives, not just workflows and visibility. How can we make real-time interactive dashboards more available? Look at what kind of tools can be integrated with them, not just working with the ones like Chef Kitchen and Habitat, but trying to make it even more flexible than what we have right now.

On support, I think there should be more focus on how we can achieve AI automations in answering questions for beginners and addressing deep concerns without general manual management.

I have used Chef for four years for infrastructure management, managing approximately up to 70 servers. This has helped in scaling applications that we develop and bring them to working through DevOps principles. This has given me quite a good experience in the company I work for and also allows me to leverage everything to scale, automate, and version control as expected.

Chef is very reliable in terms of how we work, achieving durability of scalability and monitoring of our servers. It is a good tool to work with, offering a strong developer experience and community support.

We use both public and private cloud for Chef. We use AWS  and Azure , but we also have on-premises that we depend on. We leverage both to achieve the best option possible for scaling.

We use both AWS  and Azure  depending on scenarios and areas of concern. We also work with Huawei and Oracle, as our dependencies vary based on what we want to achieve with the cloud platform.

We usually work with the Chef teams and community support, who are always willing to assist. We often reach out through Slack or the main Chef support pages. The usual emails provide a lot of support, which contributes to our success and consulting efforts.

We mostly used to rely on manual processes, but we transformed to working with VMs, either single servers or similar setups. However, we realized we needed to automate how we bring our infrastructure up. Now, we look at Ansible  as well. Ansible  differentiates with its low barrier to entry and is more of a push model, as does Puppet . We don't just work with one, but we use a combination of Puppet , Ansible, and Chef to achieve what we need.

We evaluated working with manual setups, just Ansible, and working with Puppet alone, but then we realized each of them has limitations. We combine all three based on scenarios to achieve the best results for us.

The setup cost and licensing are reasonable compared to what we deliver. Licensing looks reasonable compared to the manual work of managing whole data centers with even 10,000 servers. Chef will be better for monitoring as it brings cost in a unified way so that you don't just look at it as spending but also look at the savings at the end of the day for your licenses. This license is not quite high, depending on what we achieve, because it does a lot for us in infrastructure management.

Chef is something that solves challenges related to the cloud. Now that we are looking at scalability of data centers with thousands of servers, I will look at Chef to see how we can have everything and have other languages working on it, not just Ruby.

The advice I would give is to learn Chef and look at what you want to achieve, what you want to save, and consider time. Evaluate in terms of what you want to accomplish, and once you do, you can work with Chef very well. Chef is a good tool, and to those venturing into infrastructure management, Chef is the way to go. This review is rated 9 out of 10.

I used the solution to transform my infrastructure into code.

The solution is easy to use and learn, and it easily automates all the code and infrastructure. The solution quickly automates development in a cloud environment and provides flexibility for selecting multiple clouds in infrastructure. The solution is easy to use.

I never faced issues with the solution’s stability.

Chef is a scalable solution.

I've worked with the solution during my three months of internship and in my self-made project. I would recommend the solution to other users.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Chef is a configuration management tool, and I work for the product team of Chef. All the DevOps teams mainly use Chef for configuration management of their servers or infrastructure.

Chef is a great tool for an automation person who wants to do configuration management with infrastructure as a code.

Chef does not support the containerized things of Chef products. In the future, Chef could develop a docker container or docker images.

I have been using Chef for four years.

I rate Chef a nine out of ten for stability.

Thousands of customers are using the solution.

I rate Chef a nine out of ten for scalability.

The solution's technical support team is really good, and you can directly contact them regarding any issues.

The solution's initial setup for clients is very easy, but it is moderate for the infra server. The solution's documentation is very good, and its installation can be done in 15 to 20 minutes.

Chef is priced based on the number of nodes.

Overall, I rate Chef a nine out of ten.

We were using the tool for managing Kubernetes.

The product is useful for automating processes.

I did not like the solution. It is an old technology. Compared to Ansible, it just doesn't hold up because we need to deploy a client to each of the services we need to manage, which makes the automation much harder.

The tool was fairly stable.

The product was deployed on the cloud.

I would not recommend the solution to others. It depends entirely on how someone’s system is made, but still, I would probably suggest something else entirely. Overall, I rate the tool a four or five out of ten.

Chef is like a master chef in a kitchen for computer systems. It's used to create recipes (cookbooks) that specify how servers and apps should be set up. Chef then makes sure these instructions are followed the same way on all computers in a network. The ChefServer is like the recipe book, where all these instructions are kept and shared, making it easier to manage and control how software and systems work in a company.

The most valuable feature is its easy configuration management, optimization abilities, complete infrastructure and application automation, and its superiority over other similar tools. It smoothly integrates with CI processes and helps reduce manual errors in system management and configuration. It is an effective and user-friendly tool for automating IT infrastructure and applications.

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.

I have been using Chef for almost a year.

I would rate the stability of the solution an eight out of ten.

Approximately 16 people use Chef at our company.

Ansible has more advanced features than Chef. Ansible is easy to install, highly scalable, excels in orchestration and streamlined provisioning, and is easy to deploy. However, I cannot decide whether I prefer Ansible or Chef.

Overall, I would rate Chef a seven out of ten.