Chef Automate

I have found the Chef Automate tool especially useful owing to its infrastructure as code or IaC model. By defining configurations as code we achieved the same level of environment consistency in our deploys while significantly reducing errors.

Chef Automate enables me to describe and control the state of our servers in code. This has made our deployments more consistent and there are fewer mistakes made.

Provide a collection of modules and configuration recipes, you can integrate with Git which everyone can use it and the knife tool is awesome.

In some cases, the settings of the actual individual host might considerably deviate from the stated code base. Such an approach leads to much inconsistency, which in turn leads to a management nightmare in the planning and production processes.

Chef cookbooks are the building blocks for configuration management and can become complex and hard to manage, especially so in large environments. Fixing entangled dependencies between cookbooks is a real pain and can take hours if not days.

If is not that easy to learn, the learning curve is really long and you need to get use to use and read a lot to get the enough expertise to handle it properly.