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Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL] vs Chef comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Automic Continuous Delivery...
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Chef
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
Build Automation (13th), Release Automation (6th), Configuration Management (11th)
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer895359 - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Project Engineer at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees
Automatic installation for complex deployments and environments, with good workflow support
I like that really complex deployments are possible with it. It's very good. You have everything you need. You can design your workflows for your needs. You can do so much more, it's not just an automatic installation tool. It's a real deployment tool. I can do the complete deployment with everything that is possible.
Walter Ochieng Odhiambo - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer and Tester at Safaricom
Automation has transformed daily infrastructure work and now frees teams to focus on new challenges
One thing that Chef needs to improve on is making it available in as many languages as possible. There should be a focus on how to make it understandable, not just to infrastructure people, but also to those working in monitoring. How can we ensure that it is part of their daily input? That is something that still has a small missing link. We are almost there, but it can help us achieve outcomes in the future in terms of objectives, not just workflows and visibility. How can we make real-time interactive dashboards more available? Look at what kind of tools can be integrated with them, not just working with the ones like Chef Kitchen and Habitat, but trying to make it even more flexible than what we have right now. On support, I think there should be more focus on how we can achieve AI automations in answering questions for beginners and addressing deep concerns without general manual management.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"You can design your workflows for your needs."
"It can support very complex environments and dependencies."
"The metrics gathered after deployment, for example, the rate of success versus the rate of failure."
"We increased our quality and reduced our time costs."
"It provides a wonderful user interface which is easy to use."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to see which problems have been resolved from deployment."
"In first pilot run, we achieved five times faster deployment without human work."
"The capability to provide visibility to the stakeholders, to management, is the biggest piece that showcases what the solution is about."
"The most important thing is it can handle a 100,000 servers at the same time easily with no time constraints."
"Part of the reason why we have stuck with it is that it managed to effectively scale with us and stay stable at the same time."
"All the Chef enthusiasts who come to us to learn and train improve their skillsets to get jobs."
"The scalability of the product is quite nice; we have deployed it across six to seven organizations."
"The scalability of the product is quite nice."
"The features are good in Chef, especially its compliance feature; it's very good and it's what I found most valuable in the tool."
"The most valuable feature is automation."
"This solution has improved my organization in the way that deployment has become very quick and orchestration is easy. If we have thousands of servers we can easily deploy in a small amount of time. We can deploy the applications or any kind of announcements in much less time."
 

Cons

"There is an issue with the stability in the tool. The process of agent will stop, then the monitoring agent can't be recognized because the process is running, but you can talk with the system."
"There needs to be better error handling and error descriptions. It should be more clear what the errors are and what we can do to fix them."
"At the moment, the version that we are using (version 12.0), the environment is complex with multiple installations. Therefore, the monitoring is not scalable, but this should be improved in 12.1 and 12.2."
"The dashboard should allow you to see the current state of packages in each environment, not only on an individual application basis, but across the entire application platform."
"At the moment, the version that we are using (version 12.0), the environment is complex with multiple installations. Therefore, the monitoring is not scalable, but this should be improved in 12.1 and 12.2."
"We're a WebSphere shop so I would like to see more support for WebSphere, only because it's the platform that they seem to want to use the most."
"It would be very beneficial for us to see integrations into cloud environments, especially into the Google Cloud environment because we are heading towards cloud."
"Not a perfect ten because the user interface is brand new and it needs improvement."
"It is an old technology."
"I would rate this solution a nine because our use case and whatever we need is there. Ten out of ten is perfect."
"I would like to see more security features for Chef and more automation."
"The time that it takes in terms of integration. Cloud integration is comparatively easy, but when it comes to two-link based integrations - like trying to integrate it with any monitoring tools, or maybe some other ticketing tools - it takes longer."
"They could provide more features, so the recipes could be developed in a simpler and faster way. There is still a lot of room for improvement, providing better functionalities when creating recipes."
"Since we are heading to IoT, this product should consider anything related to this."
"Chef could get better by being more widely available, adapting to different needs, and providing better documentation."
"However, if you are on-premise, it may not be the best solution."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I can save time and money more quickly."
"Customers often complain about the price."
"If you have a fixed contract, it has limits to spreading out. If you have a flexible enterprise license contract, then you have a lot of scalability for this tool."
"We increased our quality and reduced our time costs."
"I wasn't involved in the purchasing, but I am pretty sure that we are happy with the current pricing and licensing since it never comes up."
"The price per node is a little weird. It doesn't scale along with your organization. If you're truly utilizing Chef to its fullest, then the number of nodes which are being utilized in any particular day might scale or change based on your Auto Scaling groups. How do you keep track of that or audit it? Then, how do you appropriately license it? It's difficult."
"Pricing for Chef is high."
"When we're rolling out a new server, we're not using the AWS Marketplace AMI, we're using our own AMI, but we are paying them a licensing fee."
"We are able to save in development time, deployment time, and it makes it easier to manage the environments."
"Chef is priced based on the number of nodes."
"The price is always a problem. It is high. There is room for improvement. I do like purchasing on the AWS Marketplace, but I would like the ability to negotiate and have some flexibility in the pricing on it."
"Purchasing the solution from AWS Marketplace was a good experience. AWS's pricing is pretty in line with the product's regular pricing. Though instance-wise, AWS is not the cheapest in the market."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Comms Service Provider
15%
Marketing Services Firm
11%
Real Estate/Law Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise9
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise19
 

Questions from the Community

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Chef?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that we sidestepped it by using Cinc because none of the functionality that is exclusive to the paid version was actually in use in the orga...
What needs improvement with Chef?
I would add that Ruby is a domain-specific language in the Chef dialect, which is a learning curve, but so is Terraform and so is Ansible. The only feedback would be if they could come up with an i...
What is your primary use case for Chef?
My main use case for Chef is configuration and deployments. We receive blank servers and use Chef to build predefined application or appliance servers. A quick specific example of how I use Chef to...
 

Also Known As

CA Continuous Delivery Automation, Automic Release Automation, Automic ONE Automation, UC4 Automation Platform
No data available
 

Overview

 

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BET365, Charter Communications, TASC
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