DevOps Automation with Chef

Created on 2021-02-25 10:43

Published on 2021-02-25 10:50

Chef Automate is undoubtedly the most popular automation tool for enterprises. It is a dashboard and analytics tool with cross-team collaboration features. With Chef Automate's advanced automation, the entire development, operations, and management process are made much more straightforward.

You can reduce much of the workload using Chef Automate. It has many features, including those that can help define, pack, and deliver applications. You do not have to install any additional software for all these tools to work. Chef Automate's unified framework makes balancing work easier and promotes effective collaboration.

Chef Automate can be used with any modern enterprise infrastructure without having to redefine the core.

Advantages of Using Chef

Speed

The key reason that DevOps is gaining much popularity these days is the speed. Chef can automate most of the manual tasks and focus the workforce solely on performance improvement or other core tasks. With Chef, you can create, test, and deploy applications faster than they could be done with traditional methods. This will let you deliver your services quicker and test them until they are perfect.

Resilience

Speed and resilience are the two factors of the success of any software or application. Everything that is sent out must have as few bugs as possible. It is hard to achieve this level of consistency and efficiency using traditional methods. Using Chef Automate, you can identify the issue before deployment itself and increase both speed and resilience.

You will also be able to monitor any problems in your application using Chef Automate. Thanks to the monitoring features, you can identify bugs in their initial stages and solve them from the root.

Security

DevOps is one of the most vulnerable departments in IT right now with a large number of vulnerabilities coming to light every day. Since performing traditional security checks and audits may increase the delivery time, automating security is the key to creating good applications. Chef Automate has many security features that will make your work much easier. You can add custom security reports in Chef Automate and leave the work of preparing compliance reports and identifying security risks to the infrastructure.

Chef InSpec allows users to create custom reporting templates. However, if you do not feel like these reports are necessary, you can choose from the built-in templates. The templates cover a wide range of use cases and compliance policies.

You can make full use of your DevSecOps team using Chef Automate.

Flexibility

One of the best features of Chef Automate is its integration flexibility. You can integrate Chef Automate with any cloud service provider. Chef Automate comes with a command-line tool called Knife, which makes all integrations smooth as silk. A tool like Knife is unique to Chef Automate. In other automation tools, you will have to go through many difficult and mind-numbing procedures to integrate applications.

Scalability

Scalability is another fantastic advantage of Chef Automate. You can scale your infrastructure with ease using Chef Automate.

Disadvantages of Using Chef

Limited usage of Unlimited Power

Chef Automate is a fantastic tool with many great features. The dashboards show many useful components related to your applications. However, the major disadvantage is that you cannot create custom dashboards. Since the needs of applications vary over time, it would have been a much better tool if there was an option to create dashboards with metrics that we need.

Cookbooks Control

Currently, Cookbooks in Chef Automate are not appropriately controlled. You need to continually monitor the engineers to ensure that they are not accidentally messing with other cookbooks. Users are yet to see a better access control mechanism in Chef Automate.

Not that Easy to Learn

Even though some Chef Automate tools make most of the work easier, it is still not that easy to learn. Chef uses Ruby just like Puppet. Ruby is not a popular language and has fewer resources available than other programming languages such as Python, Objective C, etc.

Limited Resources

Even though Chef Automate is quite popular, the resources are still lacking. The official Chef website has detailed documentation, but only a few video courses are available that teach how to use Chef.

History of Chef

Progress acquired Chef quite recently in 2020 for around 220 million dollars in cash. The acquisition is expected to be complete by the first quarter of 2021. This acquisition is expected to bring a massive surge to the use cases as many developers started using Chef in the past year.

With the technology of Chef and experience of Progress, we can only expect to see a major improvement to the Chef Automate platform and the other services that the Chef offers, such as InSpec.

Using Chef

Before installing Chef Automate on your system, ensure that it meets the below needs.

vCPUS stands for Virtual CPUs. You can have many virtual CPUs on a computer. It is better if the memory and storage capacity needs to meet the requirements after space and memory for virtually allotted machines are removed.

Your system also needs to meet some software requirements before getting started.

Resources

2 courses on Linkedin learning :

And the chefs website :

Conclusion

Chef Automate is a fantastic tool for automation and scaling. If you are looking for something trustworthy, scalable, and flexible, Chef Automate is the best IaaS for you.