I like the open community with lots of resources present in the documentation and also video tutorials which help someone like me who was new to this technology pick up and complete the tasks assigned easily and effectively . Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Compatibility with different programming languages such as python. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The vast variety of receipies in the community. Almost every tool installation has their own recipe. And easy management of central store for receipies. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The configuration tree for the receipe can be bit less complex. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Its very good tool to setup configuration management Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

its a agent based tool thats why we need to install agent everytiem Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We have build the scripts which makes it very easy to deploy with Chef. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

If something goes wrong its not easy to debug Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

- Great centralized features: data bags (central data storage), encrypted data bags, restricting script (cookbook) version on given nodes...etc.

- Amazing ruby-based syntax. This what makes Chef my preferred configuration management tool over other tools that use their own DSL. You can always use Ruby directly for complex tasks

- Open source: Chef has an open source version that does not lack important features

- Ability to test your Chef scripts (recipes and cookbooks) using automated InSpec tests Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

- There is some learning curve involved, but it's worth it

- It might be an overkill for simple automations Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Once you're familiar with Chef, it's a very powerful tool for ensuring that your servers are all provisioned in the exact same way, and committing those choices to source control. There is a fairly active open source, and a lot of community cookbooks already exist for common tasks. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Reasonably challenging to get up and running with, especially if you aren't coming from a Ruby background. The documentation lags somewhat and I occasionally found myself digging into source code to understand a behavior. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The Chef DK allows you to have a full CI/CD workflow for your infrastructure as code. With chef you can stick to the community cookbooks and boilerplate resources or you can make it do anything you like with raw ruby. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

As everyone says it can be a bit daunting to get started. Most new development seems to be targeted at enterprises. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like chef because it uses DSL for configuration instead of XML, Rackspace supports it very well, etc. However the absolute best thing about Chef is the concept of recipes where you can get your platform up and configured extremely easily if that platform has a chef recipe. In addition most large platforms do have chef recipes so it's great! Also, I like that it;s open source Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Some of the things i dislike about chef, and this might jkust be a criticism of configuration management in general, is that you need pretty much a full team to support it. Sometimes I feel like it adds more complexity instead of kless. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It works on most platforms windows and Linux many flavors. Robust offering Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Server head must be Linux. Not a bad thing. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.