Chef

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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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 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.

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

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.