Chef PAYG
Progress Software CorporationExternal reviews
89 reviews
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devops engineer
What do you like best about the product?
large community of users, lots of resources on the web.
What do you dislike about the product?
nothing so far, not sure why i cant submit this
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
automation, configuration as code for linux and windows systems
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
Progress Chef is an excellent tool for devops automation.
What do you like best about the product?
Progress Chef is an amazing tool for devops automation. The ease with which we can configure the instructions using receipes and cookbooks are the best feature. It is implemented using Ruby language which is super easy to understand and use as well.
What do you dislike about the product?
The chef workstation for development for cookbooks and recipes should possible be replaced by something of a UI based. Something similar to Jenkins which can provide easy configuration options.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We are using Progress Chef to automate our server patching tasks. As part of security remediation, patching is one of the tedious task which we could automate completely thanks to Chef.
Chef Configuration Management tool
What do you like best about the product?
Most of our client uses Chef to deploy new code in an automated fashion. We also use it to update existing configurations and push those changes in an automated fashion to large groups of servers. Having the ability to deploy simple or full system changes out to a large group of servers with little human interaction has been a game changer for our company allowing us to deploy at scale and grow our infrastructure as our company grows.
What do you dislike about the product?
It is very complex tool and The Chef-client agent needs to be run on the nodes frequently to update the details of it state to master. And also to index the nodes based on tags.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Chef is really great when teams are attempting to migrate over from legacy systems. In our case, it was a switch over from AIX to Linux. Thus, it was a great opportunity to use Chef to build out deployment cookbooks that could then be used win order to set up the new servers in preparation for the upgrade.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Yes, Centralized Configuration Management; Chef really excels at that as it provides a wide range of features that are well thought of, such as data bags, encrypted data bags, roles, shared repositories, cookbooks versioning, environment locking..etc
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