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Progress Chef

Progress Chef

Overview

What is Progress Chef?

Chef IT infrastructure automation suites were developed by Chef Software in Seattle and acquired by Progress Software in September 2020. The Chef Enterprise Automation Stack is an integrated suite of automation technologies presented as a solution for delivering change quickly,…

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What is Progress Chef?

Chef IT infrastructure automation suites were developed by Chef Software in Seattle and acquired by Progress Software in September 2020. The Chef Enterprise Automation Stack is an integrated suite of automation technologies presented as a solution for delivering change quickly, repeatedly, and…

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Product Details

What is Progress Chef?

Chef Infrastructure Management enables DevOps teams to model and deploy secure and scalable infrastructure automation across any cloud, VM, and/or physical infrastructure.


Progress Chef Video

In this video, we will show you What Chef is in 60 seconds. Chef has made infrastructure automation and system compliance easier with Chef Workstation. New resources and tooling make the Chef experience lighter, simpler, and even more powerful than before. We continue to enhan...
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Progress Chef Integrations

Progress Chef Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

Chef IT infrastructure automation suites were developed by Chef Software in Seattle and acquired by Progress Software in September 2020. The Chef Enterprise Automation Stack is an integrated suite of automation technologies presented as a solution for delivering change quickly, repeatedly, and securely over every application's lifecycle. The Chef Effortless Infrastructure Suit is an integrated suite of automation technologies to codify infrastructure, security, and compliance, as well as auditing and managing architectures.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, HashiCorp Terraform, and Jenkins are common alternatives for Progress Chef.

Reviewers rate Ease of integration highest, with a score of 9.6.

The most common users of Progress Chef are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews From Top Reviewers

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Yes, Chef

Rating: 9 out of 10
February 21, 2020
SZ
Vetted Review
Verified User
Progress Chef
1 year of experience
We're using Chef to deploy around 20 Linux machines that run some form of NoSQL database. We facilitate these using Chef roles and numerous cookbooks, some written in-house, and some community - depends on what is available. It's extremely powerful when making changes to a cluster environment and testing to ensure they pass tests we've implemented. Also, it makes it super easy to replace a machine if one should happen to go down. It's a real time saver compared to manually changing them one by one.
  • Once you have a cookbook, it can be reused or altered with ease.
  • Patches or swaths of changes are easy to apply to a subset of machines.
Cons
  • Counterintuitive when thinking about it from a scripting standpoint. e.g., it's about state and idempotence instead of scripts that can have unintended consequences.
  • It can cause headaches if you think about it as a scripting replacement. Both have their place, in my opinion.
Once you get your head around what it's supposed to be for, it can save massive amounts of time and headache. Getting a working cookbook is the first time you get to see its value. For me, until that point, I thought Chef was a waste of time. It's very well suited for setting up and managing lots of servers that all need the same configuration, and allows for integration testing as well. I'd say it's not well suited the other way, like if you're only building one persistent machine. It would take more time to write a cookbook to set it up than just to set it up manually.
  • There have been many positive impacts for managing large amounts of servers with ease.
  • It took a while to realize the ROI due to the initial learning curve of the software from 'traditional' approaches.
Briefly looked into Puppet but ended up going with Chef because a colleague had experience with it instead. Didn't get far enough into a deployment to even really compare the two.
I haven't yet needed to contact support for any reason. However, their documentation is excellent.

Repeatable Server Configuration and Deployment

Rating: 8 out of 10
January 30, 2020
GB
Vetted Review
Verified User
Progress Chef
2 years of experience
Chef is not an enterprise-wide tool. We use Chef within our department for the configuration management of our numerous servers. Even though we only have a small number of different types of servers, the configuration of hundreds of servers can be unwieldy. Having a standard recipes for a database server or reporting server has helped us to have a more consistent deployment. This helps when deploying new virtual machines, and helps with our speed to market.
  • System Configuration Recipes.
  • Configuration Management.
Cons
  • The recipe language could be a little more robust.
Chef is a great tool to have when you need to have consistent server deployments as it offers the use of recipes and cookbooks. Because the recipe is used, the process is repeatable, and you can expect consistent deployment results. This helps prevent drift in the configuration deployments and that allows for standardization which helps for troubleshooting server and configuration issues. For me it is critical that if we deploy 7 reporting servers, that they are all configured the same, unless requirements call for them to be different. I prefer this, what we call the "Southwest model," being that Southwest Airlines uses one type of planes, 737s, albeit different variants. We prefer all of our Linux reporting boxes to be configured alike, all the same. It's the same with our database servers; they should all be the same unless we find a valid reason for them to differ. This is where the recipes are extremely helpful and valuable.
  • Less time is spent troubleshooting configuration errors.
  • From the first time we see correct deployment of servers.
We found that Chef was easy to use, and we liked the whole concept of recipes and cookbooks. We were using the concept of recipes and cookbooks for our SQL development, so Chef was a natural fit for our team members and environment. That whole paradigm is easy for everyone to understand. The language to write the recipes wasn't too difficult to master either.
There are training and professional services available for Chef in addition to just regular support. This shows that there is a commitment from the company for this product. We have not had to use the support team much, and have been pretty much self-reliant, although we do have support as is required by our enterprise.

Chef as a robust open source alternative to licensed configuration management tool

Rating: 9 out of 10
April 29, 2020
Vetted Review
Verified User
Progress Chef
6 years of experience
Chef is used as one of the Configuration Management tool spanning both cloud and on-prem infrastructure for the whole organization. This makes it easy to monitor, management, and audit the various middleware and infrastructure components spanning on-prem and cloud environment.
  • Chef has templates that come pre-packaged that makes it easy to manage simple to moderate complexity infrastructure.
  • There Is enough community support from both large and small vendors to help get templates ('receipts') for various deployment scenarios.
  • Chef has breadth of support for both applications and the infrastructure, reducing the number of tools needed to manage the IT environment.
Cons
  • The management console can be improved to add more metrics for monitoring, especially for applications.
  • Chef can improve support for hybrid cloud deployments, especially spanning multiple clouds. Currently, this is done manually.
  • More templates ('recipes') for Internet-scale deployments, with a focus on monitoring and auditing for compliance.
Chef is very well suited if you already have an in-house DevOps teams that have many years of experience working on Chef or related tools. Chef also works well when you need a lot of customization of the monitoring and management tool and related dashboards due to the complexity of the underlying IT. It is less appropriate for small IT environments or where internal IT expertise is limited.
  • Positive impact on the business by reducing the upfront cost to purchase Chef licenses and support through the use of an open-source version of Chef.
  • Positive impact on IT spent by reducing the cost needed to maintain a large scale IT environment.
  • Improved ROI from IT through better and more realtime management of the applications and the infrastructure across cloud and on-prem deployment.
Puppet Labs and CFEngine are also open source and competes with Chef. Chef has more support from the community with templates available for large scale IT deployments. RedHat Ansible is better suited when you are already using RedHat OS and OpenShift since it comes as it comes prebuilt for it. BMC, VMware vCenter and other commercial offerings are better suited when the DevOps and IT capabilities are limited internally.
Support for Chef is easily available for fee or through the open source community as most the issues you will face will have been addressed through the Chef developer community forums. The documentation for Chef is moderate to great and easily readable.
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