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Chef Experience
What do you like best about the product?
We have used Chef for 10+ years as our configuration management tool. The Chef Infra infrastructure has been robust and provided a stable platform for us to develop against. The out of box functionality solves many of our use cases and the Chef DSL provides enough extensibility that we can create functionality for our specific use cases.
What do you dislike about the product?
My main dislike about Chef is the care and feeding required to perform a chef-client update. Usually, taking a chef-client upgrade takes us at least a month to work through rolling it out across our organization. We have chef-client running daemonized in many environments, and the upgrade process stops the automatic runs for about a 24-hour period, which means we could have server drift during this window. This means we have to be picky about which version of chef-client we run, and usually wait until a new major version is released, upgrade, and then sit on that version until EOL. Ideally, we'd love to keep that current as much as possible.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
The main business process Chef is helping us to resolve is keeping our fleet of servers standardized and consistent. It allows us to use automation and code to keep systems up to date and current with our standards and reduces our reliance on humans to do much of that work.
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Amazing Conference for Newbies!
What do you like best about the product?
The flexibility to attend virtually was very convenient, which helped me to participate in the conference at my own pace. The way marketing was done to attend the meeting was also fantastic.
What do you dislike about the product?
Nothing that I could think of. Maybe LinkedIn marketing about the conference would be much better as I personally think that many more audience could have attended.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Problems about automation, enhancements and feature updates were terrific and how Chef solves them with an automated process is very beneficial.
Chef opened the door for working with new technologies
What do you like best about the product?
Good toolset, good docs, support & community.
Complete solution with useful features.
Is in constant development using feedback from customers.
Great to work with from a developer standpoint.
Complete solution with useful features.
Is in constant development using feedback from customers.
Great to work with from a developer standpoint.
What do you dislike about the product?
Bumpy or scattered product roadmap; eg. policyfiles introduced as an afterthought, and this also shows in the web UIs. Chef Automate UI not my personal favourite.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Testing new developments on local machines,
Installing required toolsets for newly provisioned servers,
Having general overview of automation runs,
Being able to roll out updates to great number of servers at once
Installing required toolsets for newly provisioned servers,
Having general overview of automation runs,
Being able to roll out updates to great number of servers at once
chef tools best
What do you like best about the product?
I started using chef products over the last 8 years, and I became an expert in chef software running kitchens, chef knife cli, compliance, inspect, easy to integrate API's with other applications, pipeline, ruby language easy to use and get familiar quickly using chef error handling messages. Chef configuration management and deployment application.
What do you dislike about the product?
Nothing at this point and no comments about any dislike of the product.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Cost reduction is a must to keep clients using the product.
Chef Review
What do you like best about the product?
Chef is really powerful configuration management tool with great customization options and flexibility.
What do you dislike about the product?
Agent installation, complexity of use and troubleshooting steps
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Robust configuration management
Chef is a great product, but I have some concerns.
What do you like best about the product?
Chef is a great product, and it solves many of the problems we have with compliance and policy enforcement. We have reasonably good support from our success team.
What do you dislike about the product?
Development on the product seems hit or miss, sometimes rushed and not always well documented. Sometimes our customer success resources aren't sure how to solve our problems. It seems evident that something has happened internally to Progress/Chef, which is impacting their ability to develop and release stable products. This is a little panic-inducing for a company using Chef across an install base of nearly 70,000 servers.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
As mentioned, we solve quite a few build, deployment and compliance problems with Chef. Much of that work is purely steady-state, not actively developed or changed. We're hoping new versions of Chef client, Chef Automate and the underlying technologies can start driving more progress and involvement in developing Chef.
Chef Inspec enforces CIS compliance rules
What do you like best about the product?
Chef Inspec has an easy-to-understand human-readable format. We implemented the CIS benchmarks for Red Hat Linux as Inspec rules quickly and with minimal error. Now, all our systems get scanned daily for CIS compliance and non-complying systems are few. Chef Inspec is also run as part of the new system build process, so CIS compliance is there from the start.
What do you dislike about the product?
If you program in Ruby you might want to use a lot of native Ruby in Chef Inspec recipes. Avoid the temptation. First, see if there is a native Chef Inspec function.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Being 100% CIS compliant is one of our security goals. By leveraging the power of Chef Inspec we can accomplish this with less effort than coding everything from scratch.
unlocking knowledge to next level to benefit personal skills
What do you like best about the product?
Overall sessions are good; thank you for an excellent course.
What do you dislike about the product?
nothing, Quality of the content was excellent.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
building database automation
Great tool for managing packages, softwares and scripts on multiple systems
What do you like best about the product?
Formerly known as CHEF, it is used to manage all the slave systems, so we don't have to manually log in to each of the slave nodes or machines to be able to install software systems.
I used it when I was working in one of the previous product organization. We used CHEF to install multiple dependencies on the system by defining a cookbook and recipe.
So basically we can define a set of tasks which has to be executed on the system and CHEF automatically logs in to the system and does the software install, package install or maybe change the configuration.
In the big data world, suppose a node is required to have the software needed before it can operate. we just can run chef-client and it does everything automatically.
This is an amazing tool and works fast without any hassles.
I used it when I was working in one of the previous product organization. We used CHEF to install multiple dependencies on the system by defining a cookbook and recipe.
So basically we can define a set of tasks which has to be executed on the system and CHEF automatically logs in to the system and does the software install, package install or maybe change the configuration.
In the big data world, suppose a node is required to have the software needed before it can operate. we just can run chef-client and it does everything automatically.
This is an amazing tool and works fast without any hassles.
What do you dislike about the product?
Since it is built on top of ruby, sometimes it's hard to figure out what has caused the error.
There have been instances where the chef-client has failed, and it was pointed to an error, and late we got to know that it is related to ruby installation.
sometimes, the chef errors are hard to debug. There is no intelligent troubleshoot mechanism and does not suggest user where to look for exact errors and fixes.
There have been instances where the chef-client has failed, and it was pointed to an error, and late we got to know that it is related to ruby installation.
sometimes, the chef errors are hard to debug. There is no intelligent troubleshoot mechanism and does not suggest user where to look for exact errors and fixes.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Mainly we used it to manage different nodes or the machine in the cluster.
Since we used to work on the big data problem, and big data requires lots of nodes, and if one node fails, we have to reinstall all the software and packages required - also creating a custom folder, installing java, python etc.
Installing it on let's say 50 systems one by one is not feasible and would kill lot of time, so CHEF comes handly. we can define cookbook and recipe and execute the chef-client in the slave systems, and all the software and packages get installed automatically.
Since we used to work on the big data problem, and big data requires lots of nodes, and if one node fails, we have to reinstall all the software and packages required - also creating a custom folder, installing java, python etc.
Installing it on let's say 50 systems one by one is not feasible and would kill lot of time, so CHEF comes handly. we can define cookbook and recipe and execute the chef-client in the slave systems, and all the software and packages get installed automatically.
Chef makes managing IaaS resources easy
What do you like best about the product?
Chef provides us with the ability to manage infrastructure (specifically servers or IaaS resources) in a scalable way across platforms and locations. Its ease of use and common language across operating systems give the ability to easily bridge gaps between teams and understanding, thus breaking down knowledge silos and facilitating the ownership of infrastructure code by traditional application teams.
What do you dislike about the product?
Sometimes the learning curve can be steep for organizations that do not have an in-house subject matter expert.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Chef provides a great platform for enabling the management of on-prem or cloud virtual machines. It uses a DSL based on Ruby to make the management of these resources easy to capture, in code, in the same way regardless of platform or operating system. This is specifically useful when working to scale across a multi-platform organization because it gets everyone speaking the same language while giving automation coverage that is managed singly regardless of OS.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
When implementing Chef, it's important to remember this is not something that can be rolled out overnight. There are several pieces to the puzzle, and making sure you get it right from the start instead of rushing a production solution is key to your success with the tool.
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