Chef

Pros: Chef is the one of the robust configuration management tool compared to the current market option. Chef is the DevOps engineers first choice as it is having a large community in the current dedicated market place.

Highly scalability feature of the tool make it operation engineer first choice as it make possible to deploy the system with zero outage with the help of docker. Open source code provide the great transparency in the tool. Chef play a vital role in the DevOps software lifecycle as it manage the configuration and help to provide the automatic lifecycle.

Cons: Installation process is bit tricky, specially at the time of configuring master server for it. Master server can be setup on Linux/Unix machine. Chef need code based knowledge for scripting the tool which make it little complex. Documentation is also very large it must come with and fast guide.

Overall: We are using it in our production and Unit Test environment. The automation provide by the DevOps tool is really excellent. We have jump into the Chef Enterprise edition as it really helping us from so many years.

Pros: 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.

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

Pros: Chef is the one of the highly popular tool for configuration management tool for DevOps practice. Deploying of 100s severs with a automation process with zero human error can be possible by chef. Many MNCs and other organization are jumping to devOps with help of Chef. Its highy scalable with high availability of it as its having the provision of backup master agent server. Its design to deploy, configure and manage servers. Source Code is also available of GIT as its open source software tool.

Cons: Chef Master server can be configured to linux or unix, but client can be on wimdows also.

Setup process is also lengthy then tool named Ansible. As it have to install for both master and client server to make it work.

Overall: Chef is configuration management tool which is helping in automation of deployment process by which we doing the same task with less amount of time with zero errors as its completely follow automatic process.

Pros: 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.

Cons: 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.

Overall: We made our hardware infrastructure much easier to manage through chef.

Pros: 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.

Cons: 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.

Pros: 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.

Cons: 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.

Pros: Mostly used for deploying on unit test systems(within 30 minutes)

Automated software installation

Simultaneously review the changes applied to servers

Cons: Not powerful as compared to ansible

Training recommended(should have basic coding skills)

Pros: 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.

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

Pros: 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.

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

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

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

Pros: Extendable with scripting language, easy configuration files

Cons: Other platforms have better pre configured deployment scripts

Overall: Overall versatile and easy to use,takes time to deploy, customization may require scripting knowledge

Pros: good to register nodes, then install cookbook sfrom supermarket. ready to use cookbooks simoly deploy them on registered nodes.

Cons: the architecture of chef server, chef client and chef nodes is difficult to understand for beginners ,Also it have lot of authentication access formalties for setup.

Pros: Chef is widely used in industry and hence has very good documentation and support. It has been designed for programmers mindset, very convient to write instructions in ruby. It can scale to large environment without much issues.

Cons: It has pull mechanism and schedules. Hence changes are not immediately observed. It has some learning curve. I found the setup is little bit complicated.

Pros: i have many registered nodes/system which i need to manage and run different scripts

chef allows me to download scripts/cookbook from supermarket and i can execute the, on specific nodes.

Cons: Chef is a complicated software, though it have very huge capabilities but seting up chef architecture require great level of knowledge in devops .

Pros: I love this software! Its so easy to use. The support team is always on par and able to help me out.

Pros: It has cloud configuration and automation, it includes management of security, you don't have to be a DevOps to use it, it has a world wide community.

Eventhough it is Open Source is really stable, it offers analytics and reporting.

Cons: It is some how difficult to learn so the initial configurations and process are a bit hard, the delivery process has to be as canonical as posible, its documentation is not in one single container, and it could be difficult to find and review.

Pros: 1) Easy and user-friendly user interface.

2) Configurations are quite easy.

3) Easy availability of various cookbooks on cookbook hub

Cons: 1) Some things from tutorial are missing like project can be used directly to create docker image and consequently container, later which can be used for chef-node.

Overall: I used it for horizontal scalability in my project. I created dedicated webserver and database server using chef.

Pros: the documentation is very good, I find a lot of informations there besides what is available in other places.

Cons: I for my self hate that mac is not supported as I do have to work on mac from time to time, so you are tied to windows and linux only.