
Chef Automate (First 10 nodes free)
Chef | 1.8.85Linux/Unix, CentOS 7.2 - 64-bit Amazon Machine Image (AMI)
External reviews

External reviews are not included in the AWS star rating for the product.
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.
- Leave a Comment |
- Mark review as helpful
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
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.
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.
showing 11 - 20