Chef Enterprise Automation Stack Reviews

Chef is the configuration management tool. It helps in automation build, deploys and manages the CI pipeline and also provides the collaboration and makes clean and easy way for release. The Open Source code make it transparent and easy to debug and customize it. Chef is the best tool to pick form the CM DevOps option as it has the most features that need a CI pipeline need it at the time of development and delivery. Chef is highly scalable with high availability as backup master node is also there.

Implementation is the most complex part. There should be wizards for the same to make it simple and easy. Master Node can be configured on linux only, So it makes it compulsory to know LINUX while setup of master node. ChefBook is not as easy as yaml scripting language.

The agent can be modified to use a specific port which could be an advantage for networks that require common ports like SSH and WinRM to be closed.

The agent requires more overhead to make sure the updates reach the destination in a large segmented network.

We've been using Chef in production for 7 years now. As other technologies have entered into the scene, Chef has continued to evolve and keep up with the latest trends. It remains a solid choice for configuration management and infrastructure deployment, whether on virtual machines, or containers.

Templating language can be a bit hard to learn especially for those not already familiar with the Ruby programming language.

One of the best configuration management tools available in market, because of availability of wide varieties of extensions it helps you to write cookbooks for any kind of platforms

Agent based solution makes it less favorite for end-users who like agent less CI tools like ansible, salt stack

Chef is probably the best solution for enterprise configuration management. The language is very easy to use if you are familiar with Ruby and even if you are not the documentation is very easy to follow.

It is very resource intensive to perform Chef runs so is not very suited to low capacity server or VPS's. So its more suited to large enterprise where there are sufficient resources available.

The Chef Enterprise Automation stack is better automation tool in DevOps Industry. Easy to Deploy and Maintenance both On-Premises and Cloud Infrastructure.

The Chef Enterprise Automation stack may improve their deployment methodologies compared with others tool Like Ansible , Salt.

Chef excels in automation, making managing large tech setups a breeze and simplifying the delivery of updates.

Chef's complexity and reliance on coding knowledge can be a challenge for beginners, and it lacks a user-friendly interface for managing configurations.

Chef is a powerful platform which, once setup, permits to achieve a big efficiency on installation and configuration of complex middleware and software components, as well on deploying artefacts.

Lack of full retro compatibility when switching to new versions of software.
Long learning curve is also a con.

I like that you write cookbook where you define, how your virtual machine should work. It makes deployments easy and everything run as smooth as it should.

Nothing to dislike since it works as it should - uses Ruby for cookbook defining and i like this product.

Chef is an open source tool for configuration management, focused on the developer side for its user base. Chef operates as a master-client model, with a separate workstation needed to control the master. It's based in Ruby, with pure Ruby used for most elements you write. The Chef design is transparent and based on following the instructions it's given, which means that you'll have to make sure your instructions are clear.Chef is good for development-focused teams and environments. It's good for enterprises looking for a more mature solution for a heterogeneous environment.

1. The learning curve is steep if you're not already familiar with Ruby and procedural coding.
2. It's not a simple tool, which can lead to large code bases and complicated environments.
3. Doesn't support push functionality.

Easy to setup tool which works on pull mechanism, easy to learn

Basic understanding on config management tool is required

The best thing about Chef is that we can force servers to have the files we want on them with the content that we want and make sure that packages are installed/updated without much effort.

If you decide a file/package should not be placed/installed on a server anymore you have to explicitly state that you want to remove it. Deciding not to install it is not enough. Also, the unit tests have a pretty steep learning curve.

Easy to implement, learn and use on daily basis for Configuration Management.

WebIU does not allow modifucation of configurations

Really liked that the ability that it allowed scaling to be done relatively easily and if I had any questions I got a response back quickly.

Set up did take some time and using their API. No complaints other than that. They are also very friendly with support questions and answers.

Once you configure your CLI and learn your away around setting up cookbooks and environments, it is easy to check in on the state of your infrastructure and perform updates and actions across many machines.

It can be difficult to track infrastructure as code if you have engineers making changes manually, and setting up permissions can be difficult at times.

I like that I can configure an entire Oracle middleware environment within a matter of hours, instead of it taking days. This works well for our dev/qa/prod environments.

Not very flexible with Windows configuration, there is also not a lot of documentation out there for specific Windows configurations.

when it comes to configuration managementa nd maintianing same dependencies in various system chef can be used to write recepis and pulling them on the nodes.

The concept of chef server, node and workstation requires a lot of setup to start with.The process can be made more automated.

it helps in creating different nodes for different envronment and make runlist for each of them seaparately which makes configuration management easy.

setting up the environment is difficult and gives many errors which can be avoided by bringing more automation to the process.

chef offers a CLI and GUI to report on fleets of deployed assets and configurations assigned to them.

getting at individual attributes and hosts can be cumbersome to parse from the command output.