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Chef

Build, destroy and rebuild servers on any public or private cloud
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What is Chef?

Chef enables you to manage and scale cloud infrastructure with no downtime or interruptions. Freely move applications and configurations from one cloud to another. Chef is integrated with all major cloud providers including Amazon EC2, VMWare, IBM Smartcloud, Rackspace, OpenStack, Windows Azure, HP Cloud, Google Compute Engine, Joyent Cloud and others.
Chef is a tool in the Server Configuration and Automation category of a tech stack.
Chef is an open source tool with GitHub stars and GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Chef's open source repository on GitHub

Who uses Chef?

Companies
430 companies reportedly use Chef in their tech stacks, including Airbnb, Facebook, and Shopify.

Developers
693 developers on StackShare have stated that they use Chef.

Chef Integrations

Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, Datadog, Zabbix, and AWS CodeDeploy are some of the popular tools that integrate with Chef. Here's a list of all 31 tools that integrate with Chef.
Pros of Chef
110
Dynamic and idempotent server configuration
76
Reusable components
47
Integration testing with Vagrant
43
Repeatable
30
Mock testing with Chefspec
14
Ruby
8
Can package cookbooks to guarantee repeatability
7
Works with AWS
3
Has marketplace where you get readymade cookbooks
3
Matured product with good community support
2
Less declarative more procedural
2
Open source configuration mgmt made easy(ish)
Decisions about Chef

Here are some stack decisions, common use cases and reviews by companies and developers who chose Chef in their tech stack.

Erwin Saputra
Senior Software Engineer at Appsindo Technology · | 1 upvote · 29.5K views
Shared insights
at

Our custom recipes makes it simple for developers bootstrap process (using vagrant) and that same recipe is also the one that is used to prep instances Chef

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Shared insights
at

We use Chef to streamline the task of configuration and managing the servers we host our tools on.

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Chef's Features

  • Access to 800+ Reusable Cookbooks
  • Integration with Leading Cloud Providers
  • Enterprise Platform Support including Windows and Solaris
  • Create, Bootstrap and Manage OpenStack Clouds
  • Easy Installation with 'one-click' Omnibus Installer
  • Automatic System Discovery with Ohai
  • Text-Based Search Capabilities
  • Multiple Environment Support
  • "Knife" Command Line Interface
  • "Dry Run" Mode for Testing Potential Changes
  • Manage 10,000+ Nodes on a Single Chef Server
  • Available as a Hosted Service
  • Centralized Activity and Resource Reporting
  • "Push" Command and Control Client Runs
  • Multi-Tenancy
  • Role-Based Access Control [RBAC]
  • High Availability Installation Support and Verification
  • Centralized Authentication Using LDAP or Active Directory

Chef Alternatives & Comparisons

What are some alternatives to Chef?
Ansible
Ansible is an IT automation tool. It can configure systems, deploy software, and orchestrate more advanced IT tasks such as continuous deployments or zero downtime rolling updates. Ansible’s goals are foremost those of simplicity and maximum ease of use.
Puppet Labs
Puppet is an automated administrative engine for your Linux, Unix, and Windows systems and performs administrative tasks (such as adding users, installing packages, and updating server configurations) based on a centralized specification.
Terraform
With Terraform, you describe your complete infrastructure as code, even as it spans multiple service providers. Your servers may come from AWS, your DNS may come from CloudFlare, and your database may come from Heroku. Terraform will build all these resources across all these providers in parallel.
Jenkins
In a nutshell Jenkins CI is the leading open-source continuous integration server. Built with Java, it provides over 300 plugins to support building and testing virtually any project.
Dotenv
It is a zero-dependency module that loads environment variables from a .env file into process.env. Storing configuration in the environment separate from code is based on The Twelve-Factor App methodology.
See all alternatives

Chef's Followers
1088 developers follow Chef to keep up with related blogs and decisions.