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Chef has always been innovative and continues to be now that they are in the Progress family..
What do you like best about the product?
The Progress Chef team is responsive and reachable. They react to concerns and are always ready to help. The tools are best-of-breed and are constantly being improved.
What do you dislike about the product?
Documentation of new features can often be a bit sparse, and discovering said new changes can be a bit difficult. Documentation also varies in detail level and scope.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
First and foremost, compliance. InSpec is completely a game changer in that regard. Ensuring consistency across the enterprise is another huge benefit. I would recommend InSpex (and have) to anyone facing technical compliance issues.
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Chef Review - Continuous Configuration & Compliance
What do you like best about the product?
With Chef, we are able to manage nodes in a new way. Our clients get insight into the health, configuration, and compliance of their system in a single platform. Also, since everything is in code, the ways to customize cookbooks, inspec profiles, and tailor policy for each node are limitless.
What do you dislike about the product?
The Chef community definitely has some growing to do. Progress Chef has been making an effort to listen to community members and they need to continue their journey of building up the community to what it once was.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Continued enforcement. Knowing that my nodes are checking in regularly so that I can pin point when something unexpected occurs is huge. The automate dashboard gives me visibility at a glance to track down anomolies.
Progress Chef - My Experience
What do you like best about the product?
Centralizing our configuration management for all of our managed nodes through cookbooks for all of our environments. Visibility into the cached cookbooks and ability to test locally.
What do you dislike about the product?
Repeatability is tricky with Chef's two-pass model. Troubleshooting is challenging once the Chef codebase grows significantly. The attributes precedence evaluation is funky.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Chef is solving the automation of our configuration management for all existing and new deployments. We use it a a source of truth for our configuration, ensuring that config is repeatable.
Amazing tool to maintain large IT infrastructure
What do you like best about the product?
The biggest upside is the ability to maintain IT infrastructure config as code. This allows for easy scaling and management of resources. It also ensures no unplanned configuration drift.
What do you dislike about the product?
The minor inconvenience with using chef is handling the installation of the chef client on the remote hosts.
I think it would be better if chef provides an easier tooling to manage the initial setup/installation of the chef-client on the hosts.
I think it would be better if chef provides an easier tooling to manage the initial setup/installation of the chef-client on the hosts.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
The biggest advantage of using chef is the ability to manage configuration as code, that is the biggest advantage for us.
Great solution if you need to manage and run workloads on traditional hosts (VM & physical)
What do you like best about the product?
Everything is as code, so it's flexible and easy to reuse code. There are many pre-made cookbooks available on the Chef Supermarket to deploy a wide variety of software.
What do you dislike about the product?
- Test Kitchen and Chef InSpec are too rigid and prevent testing more advanced scenarios, e.g., upgrading a service from version A to B.
- Since there's no notion of state, it is hard to track resources that need to be deleted.
- The attributes precedence logic is way too complicated.
- Since there's no notion of state, it is hard to track resources that need to be deleted.
- The attributes precedence logic is way too complicated.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Chef allows our organization to manage and deploy services on hundreds of nodes. For instance, patching vulnerabilities such as Log4j is made easy using Chef. Since everything is in git, we have good traceability of changes made to the infrastructure.
DevSecOps via code
What do you like best about the product?
I like the fact that you can control your Operations via code. This allows you create a server repeatedly with changes can be made with very little effort.
What do you dislike about the product?
To get to good DevSecOps a lot of code needs to be written.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
I would like to see Progress create more methods that create a hardened box without much coding.
Good tool for Cloud support
What do you like best about the product?
Agnostic tool that can provide support across cloud environments. Avoiding code lock-in is a best practice for us.
What do you dislike about the product?
There are dependencies across versions that can problematic. Changes to the user interface were not ideal.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Having a single source for our automation allows us to maximize the value of those scripts and gain speed in deployments across environments.
I love Chef!
What do you like best about the product?
Chef works best to enable our team to keep a tight watch on security concerns while allowing developers to create self-service vms and bootstrap them with their custom cookbooks.
What do you dislike about the product?
The biggest downside is that we have to use WSL to use test kitchen.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Chef solves the problem of how we transition from a "pets" to "cattle" server model.
Save time with Chef
What do you like best about the product?
Progress Chef allows our developers to have more control over their web application infrastructure, thereby allowing the developers to roll out web applications and services more quickly.
What do you dislike about the product?
- Figuring out the syntax required in Ruby to implement a given resource update is sometimes difficult.
- It's not easy to pass status information from powershell scripts back to Chef/Ruby.
- It's not real clear what Progress Chef is responsible for vs the Chef community.
- It's not easy to pass status information from powershell scripts back to Chef/Ruby.
- It's not real clear what Progress Chef is responsible for vs the Chef community.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Progress Chef automates a lot of the IIS setup that we previously performed manually. That speeds things up for our developers, as they don't have to submit service requests to IT Infrastructure to configure IIS. We are also now making additional use of Chef Inspec to ensure that our servers are hardened to CIS level 1 requirements.
Its good tool for pull model for both windows and Linux nodes
What do you like best about the product?
We like to use this for push model for CIS benchmark configurations
What do you dislike about the product?
It is good if we can have push model to use to deploy configurations.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
It resolves most of the configuration keys in CIS benchmark model
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