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Chef SaaS

Progress Chef | 1

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External reviews

85 reviews
from G2

External reviews are not included in the AWS star rating for the product.

    Michael M.

Powerful tool but difficult to get started with

  • May 22, 2016
  • Review provided by G2

What do you like best about the product?
Simplifies bootstrapping fleets of servers and managing required packages. Allows developers to build upon a library of packages from other developers so they don't need to start at the basics from scratch and can more quickly and easily start on the parts that really matter
What do you dislike about the product?
Very difficult and time consuming to set up and get started with; large learning curve; compatibility issues with little to no documentation
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Automating deployments, versioning deployment code, granular user permissions, scalable and highly available infrastructure and applications
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Consider as a possible solution for your DevOps build but also consider other tools like Ansible. You may very quickly become dependent on Chef once you implement it so make sure you like it and it meets your needs first. Team members with previous experience will be a huge plus to overcome the initial learning curve and setup time.

    Mario C.

Automating deployment with Chef

  • April 13, 2016
  • Review provided by G2

What do you like best about the product?
Chef is a standard in automated deployment. Is used in Facebook and it's really REALLY powerful. It's a very serious thing about deployment automation and it's capabilities are huge. Maintains states (software, configuration...) of the entire cluster, and I'm talking about hundreds of nodes. Cookbooks are very popular and you can find them to do almost everything in the open source community.
What do you dislike about the product?
Chef is terribly complex to deploy by itself, not only needs a Chef Server that internally will install a RabbitMQ, a SQL database, a Nginx... it can really take a lot of resources of your machine.

Not only this, you need to install a daemon, Chef Client, on each Chef node you want to manage. Of course if this Client fails... your node is "lost" for Chef and you cannot manage it anymore until you restart the client.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We were automating the installation of 8 to 10 linux packages over a set of 4 to 20 machines. We were using a "root" machine to start the installation and, using a web ui, let a user select a set of technologies to install them on the rest of the nodes.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
If you really, really need to manage a big set of nodes to do very complex things, you can give Chef a try (you also have Puppet). But if need something relatively simple I don't think is worth the effort. As I mention before, Chef is quite complex if you want to do simple things (maybe Ansible fits better in this case)

    Kevin V.

Great tool for system configuration management

  • April 07, 2016
  • Review verified by G2

What do you like best about the product?
Chef is pretty solid for configuration management of Windows machines and ensuring that they are all setup and provisioned the same way. The setup and scripting of recipes is pretty extensive, and Windows support is solid. There are a variety of recipes to do most windows configuration needed, as well as Linux.
What do you dislike about the product?
The setup is pretty complex, it can take awhile to just setup a server and figure out how to connect a client to it. It would be nice to have more functionality exposed in the Chef GUI, using command line for a majority of tasks can be tedious at times. Chef is mainly geared toward ensuring a server is configured properly, but it would be nice to have the option for 'one off' tasks. When you have agents already running on your systems for Chef it would be nice to run a task on a subset of machines instead of yet another agent and management system for that. It also runs best if you have a person dedicated to the configuration and on going maintenance of Chef. It takes some effort to keep up on your recipes.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Chef solves the system configuration management issue pretty well, it is able to ensure that machines are setup similarly. The 'configuration as code' aspect makes it clear to the organization what is involved in setting up and configuration of a server. It helps to document the process as long as you follow through on continuously adding recipes as you move along.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
If you are using Azure, check out Microsoft's Azure lab on setting up Chef, it significantly speeds up the implementation process. Be sure to run through some tutorials and documentation on the Chef website as it is very difficult to setup straight out of the box. There aren't really any wizards or in-product tutorials.

    Todd P.

Chef is Awesome!

  • March 31, 2016
  • Review verified by G2

What do you like best about the product?
The shear amount that you can do with the product from Linux to Windows, configurations to application deployments, Chef is delightfully AWESOME!!!!!
What do you dislike about the product?
I personally don't have any dislikes for Chef as a product. The only caveat is when creating resources, you'll need to increase your Ruby knowledge and skills.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
When I jumped on the infrastructure as code bandwagon, I was testing both Chef and Puppet to Linux and Windows deployments. I chose Chef as they fixed a pending reboot issue with RDSH first. As a Solution/managed Service provider, the ability to reduce deployment time with a standard automated deployment methodology is invaluable.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
To learn Chef, I highly recommend using the http://learn.chef.io . Even for an OPs guy, Chef is awesome!

    Computer & Network Security

Chef is Infraestructure as a Code

  • March 10, 2016
  • Review verified by G2

What do you like best about the product?
Not biased to said that everything from Opscode - Chef was well design, from their solo version to the Chef Provisioning module. You can write and deploy your whole infraestructure.
What do you dislike about the product?
Chef Server Operation could give trouble as in performance issues.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Infraestructure as Code. Continuos Delivering and Integration.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Design well and do not forget to have clever metrics from your CI and CD workflow

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