Chef Automate (First 10 nodes free)
Chef | 1.8.85Linux/Unix, CentOS 7.2 - 64-bit Amazon Machine Image (AMI)
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We have had less production issues since using it to automate our provisioning
We use it for provisioning Adobe Experience Manager web application environments.
How has it helped my organization?
It has given us more resiliency in all the stuff we now manage with Chef, which was previously sort of manually maintained. Now, we are able to drive all of that through version control and automation, which is a lot faster.
What is most valuable?
It has been very easy to tie it into our build and deploy automation for production release work, etc. All the Chef pieces more or less run themselves.
What needs improvement?
There is a slight barrier to entry if you are used to using Ansible, since it is Ruby-based. However, it is just a different product and requires you to acclimate yourself, just like any other product would.
For how long have I used the solution?
One to three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We have had no stability issues.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The scalability works. We haven't scaled it too high. We have a few different servers in different places.
We have been looking into the high availability offering, but we haven't actually stood it up yet. We are hopeful about it though.
How is customer service and technical support?
We have had to open a few Amazon support tickets. However, they have typically not been Chef-related, they have been Amazon service-related.
The technical support has been great. Our tickets have all been closed out quickly.
Which solutions did we use previously?
Our environments used to be on-premise, then we were moving them into the cloud. Since they were big and complicated, we decided we needed a manageable provisioning system instead of doing it by hand every time.
What was our ROI?
We have seen ROI. It has decreased a lot of man-hours that we were previously spending doing stuff which we now manage with Chef. It has decreased when we have a production issue, since we are able to fix it faster. We also have had less production issues since using Chef to automate our provisioning.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I wasn't involved in the purchasing, but I am pretty sure that we are happy with the current pricing and licensing since it never comes up.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We considered Chef, Puppet, Ansible, and homegrown solutions. We had a couple people who used to use Ansible and some people who had previously used Chef. I think we just settled on Chef after trying it because we liked that it was Ruby-based, and there were a lot of community cookbooks already. This lined up parallel with what we wanted to be doing.
What other advice do I have?
I would recommend Chef. It is very user-friendly. There are a lot of community resources which make it easy to onboard. It also plays nicely with existing automation tools and other things which you are probably already using.
Chef works with Adobe Experience Manager, Terraform, and AWS CLI tools. We have been pleased with the integration.
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When you are running a large cluster with hybrid applications, it can be very instrumental in making sure that they are running in sync
We use it for deployment of applications. It is a tool that you can use on the back-end for deploying architectures.
I have used the product for a couple years. I used to work for an online data center, and we used Chef for a lot of the tools and appointments.
How has it helped my organization?
When you are running a large cluster with hybrid applications, it can be very instrumental in making sure that they are running in sync. The tools it offers for running in environments has made it a good solution to use.
What is most valuable?
Its most valuable feature is automation.
What needs improvement?
Third-party innovations need improvement, and I would like to see more integration with other platforms.
For how long have I used the solution?
One to three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We put quite a lot of stress on it, especially in our larger environments.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The scalability is good. I have used it for several environments, from small (a couple of servers) to large clusters more than 50 servers).
What was our ROI?
We have seen a lot of ROI. Our customers really enjoy the tool. We are able to save in development time, deployment time, and it makes it easier to manage the environments.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Purchasing the solution from AWS Marketplace was a good experience. AWS's pricing is pretty in line with the product's regular pricing. Though instance-wise, AWS is not the cheapest in the market.
The AWS platform is solid. With the technologies that they offer, it makes it easy to integrate. When you are building environments and your able to integrate everything together, this is good thing.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We looked at a combination of open source and other paid solutions. It was hard because Chef offered many options that others didn't, so it wasn't a one-to-one comparison.
Chef had better functionality, flexibility, and price. It is a clean product that is easy to work with and our customers like the product.
What other advice do I have?
It works well. I would highly recommend it.
It is a well thought out product which integrates well with what developers and customers are looking for.
The product works well with VMware environments.
It integrates with many products in ILT and data management areas with each of them providing cloud computing
I have used in my current company for three years, and with other clients for more than ten years.
How has it helped my organization?
My clients are happy, which is the most important thing.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable feature is automation.
What needs improvement?
The AWS monitoring, AWS X-Ray, and some other features could be improved.
For how long have I used the solution?
More than five years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We have some issues in Brazilian region with stability. However, in US region, we have no issues with stability.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Scalability is pretty good. We have nothing to complain about, except the price.
How is customer service and technical support?
I would rate the technical support as a ten out of ten.
Amazon is a great partner.
How was the initial setup?
The integration and configuration are pretty good in the AWS environment. The problems are usually on our side, not on AWS' side.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The price is always a problem. It is high. There is room for improvement. I do like purchasing on the AWS Marketplace, but I would like the ability to negotiate and have some flexibility in the pricing on it.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I don't like some of the products offered by VMware. I like the automation offered by Chef and Puppet.
We chose Chef because some clients have some legacy systems and decided to work with them. We don't really like work with VMs, but when we have to, we use Puppet.
What other advice do I have?
I have used the on-premise and AWS versions. I prefer the AWS for troubleshooting.
Its recipes are easy to write and move across different servers and environments. However, they need to provide better functionalities when creating recipes.
Our primary use case is having the properties set up across the servers. We have Chef recipes deployed and configured across our servers, so we get the same type of replication across our servers and environments.
We are using the on-premise version. We have our applications already set up for on-premise. We are using Chef and preparing it for CI/CD and other properties. Now, we are planning ahead and will use the AWS service too.
How has it helped my organization?
Earlier, we used to do everything manually, such as configuring the servers across different environments. Using Chef and Puppet, we can automate our CI/CD process with reduced effort from our DevOps team.
What is most valuable?
Chef recipes are easy to write and move across different servers and environments.
What needs improvement?
They could provide more features, so the recipes could be developed in a simpler and faster way. There is still a lot of room for improvement, providing better functionalities when creating recipes.
We would also like more recipes. This is key for us.
For how long have I used the solution?
Less than one year.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We do put a lot of stress on it from the QA, staging, and servers. We have a CI/CD pipeline continuously running as the developer commits the code to Chef and Puppet, which are always up and running.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The scalability is working well for our organization.
How is customer service and technical support?
As a developer, I don't use the technical support.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
We are still in the process of evaluating Chef Compute. Currently, we use Chef and Puppet. Soon, we will probably be purchasing it from AWS Marketplace.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We were already using Chef and Puppet for most of our DevOps. These were our only choices.
What other advice do I have?
I would definitely recommend using Chef.
Chef integrates and configures well with AWS and other products. We use Chef and Puppet together. We are also using Splunk for log traces. We just started using Chef with AWS for easy to use containers. AWS is great for storage, CloudFormation, and CloudFrond CDN.
A Great Configuration Management tool
What do you like best about the product?
- Great centralized features: data bags (central data storage), encrypted data bags, restricting script (cookbook) version on given nodes...etc.
- Amazing ruby-based syntax. This what makes Chef my preferred configuration management tool over other tools that use their own DSL. You can always use Ruby directly for complex tasks
- Open source: Chef has an open source version that does not lack important features
- Ability to test your Chef scripts (recipes and cookbooks) using automated InSpec tests
- Amazing ruby-based syntax. This what makes Chef my preferred configuration management tool over other tools that use their own DSL. You can always use Ruby directly for complex tasks
- Open source: Chef has an open source version that does not lack important features
- Ability to test your Chef scripts (recipes and cookbooks) using automated InSpec tests
What do you dislike about the product?
- There is some learning curve involved, but it's worth it
- It might be an overkill for simple automations
- It might be an overkill for simple automations
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Automates compute nodes configuration, so solves problems like: environment inconsistencies, speed up deploying new nodes, ..etc
Cooking with infrastructure as code
What do you like best about the product?
Once you're familiar with Chef, it's a very powerful tool for ensuring that your servers are all provisioned in the exact same way, and committing those choices to source control. There is a fairly active open source, and a lot of community cookbooks already exist for common tasks.
What do you dislike about the product?
Reasonably challenging to get up and running with, especially if you aren't coming from a Ruby background. The documentation lags somewhat and I occasionally found myself digging into source code to understand a behavior.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Automating and standardizing server configuration. Reducing the number of errors that arise from server configuration drift.
Watch "sudo automate-ctl tail" until it calms down, THEN initialize.
I initially also had the same issue with the 500 error when attempting to download the starter kit. After playing with this a bit, I discovered the cause. The system was not fully initialized.
No upgrade is necessary for this AMI to succeed. Just wait until "sudo automate-ctl tail" calms down i.e. not scrolling so often, then perform the initialization step.
STEP 1: CREATE / LAUNCH AWS AUTOMATE INSTANCE:
STEP 2: LOGIN TO AWS CHEF AUTOMATE:
$ ssh -i
STEP 3: WATCH CHEF AUTOMATE LOGS UNTIL THEY CHILL OUT
$ sudo automate-ctl tail
STEP 4: CONFIGURE CHEF AUTOMATE (after automate-ctl tail calms down):
https://
STEP 5: LOGIN TO CHEF AUTOMATE
https://
STEP 6: PROCEED WITH LEARN CHEF RALLY CONTENT
Great for learning Chef Automate
Others have left poor ratings and reviews, but its really due to their lack of drive to learn Chef, much less debug. The first thing I did after launching this AMI, was upgrade chef-server and chef-automate on the instance. Simple Google searches will reveal an easy process to do this.
SSH into your instance (it's an Amazon Linux AMI, btw) to perform the upgrades as I mentioned. From there, activate your Automate instance as described in the "Usage Instructions" listed for your instance in the EC2 console.
Return to your Learn Chef Rally exercise to bootstrap any nodes that you'd like. In all, this was a very painless process to running on Chef Automate!
Automation meets DevOps
What do you like best about the product?
It works on most platforms windows and Linux many flavors. Robust offering
What do you dislike about the product?
Server head must be Linux. Not a bad thing.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Server build similar to Desired State
Recommendations to others considering the product:
A proven leader in Automation software
It doesn't work
I have tried multiple times to create an instance of this AMI and set up chef, but it doesn't connect.
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