We performed a comparison between Chef and UrbanCode Deploy based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Release Automation solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."One thing that we've been able to do is a tiered permission model, allowing developers and their managers to perform their own operations in lower environments. This means a manager can go in and make changes to a whole environment, whereas a developer with less access may only be able to change individual components or be able to upgrade the version for software that they have control over."
"Chef recipes are easy to write and move across different servers and environments."
"Chef is a great tool for an automation person who wants to do configuration management with infrastructure as a code."
"The most valuable feature is automation."
"Automation is everything. Having so many servers in production, many of our processes won't work nor scale. So, we look for tools to help us automate the process, and Chef is one of them."
"It is a well thought out product which integrates well with what developers and customers are looking for."
"Chef can be scaled as needed. The Chef server itself can scale but it depends on the available resources. You can upgrade specific resources to meet the demand. Similarly, with clients, you can add as many clients as you need. Again, this depends on the server resources. If the server has enough resources, it can handle the number of servers required to manage the infrastructure. Chef can be scaled to meet the needs of the infrastructure being managed."
"If you're handy enough with DSL and you can present your own front-facing interface to your developers, then you can actually have a lot more granular control with Chef in operations over what developers can perform and what they can't."
"It is very easy to make a software release. It used to take us at least a couple of hours to make a release, now we went to production with a new one last night. This new release took me five minutes."
"The stability is good. I haven't experienced any issues."
"The most valuable feature is the snapshot functionality, which allows us to access previous versions of the artifacts."
"The solution handles complex deployments very efficiently."
"The most valuable functionality is the ability to define the deployment process, schedule the deployment and automatically execute the deployments to different environments."
"Stable solution that's good for automating the CI/CD pipeline: from development to production."
"The agent on the server sometimes acts finicky."
"It is an old technology."
"There is a slight barrier to entry if you are used to using Ansible, since it is Ruby-based."
"Support and pricing for Chef could be improved."
"Chef could get better by being more widely available, adapting to different needs, and providing better documentation."
"There appears to be no effort to fix the command line utility functionality, which is definitely broken, provides a false positive for a result when you perform the operation, and doesn't work."
"In the future, Chef could develop a docker container or docker images."
"Since we are heading to IoT, this product should consider anything related to this."
"The technical support of the solution could definitely be improved as PMRs take long to resolve."
"I would like to have the agent up and running at all times, as opposed to only while it is in the DevOps pipeline."
"The interface allows access in a number of ways but that can be confusing."
"I certainly would like to have a better way to pass information between deployment steps using UrbanCode Deploy because that's really difficult to do."
"I would like to see more reporting for container architecture."
"The scalability of this application needs improvement. Changes and variations in the application become bottlenecks as they need to be more seamless and comfortable."
Chef is ranked 15th in Release Automation with 18 reviews while UrbanCode Deploy is ranked 6th in Release Automation with 27 reviews. Chef is rated 8.0, while UrbanCode Deploy is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of Chef writes "Easy configuration management, optimization abilities, and complete infrastructure and application automation". On the other hand, the top reviewer of UrbanCode Deploy writes "It offers OOTB plugins for middleware". Chef is most compared with Jenkins, AWS Systems Manager, Microsoft Azure DevOps and Microsoft Configuration Manager, whereas UrbanCode Deploy is most compared with GitLab, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, Microsoft Azure DevOps, HCL Launch and GoCD. See our Chef vs. UrbanCode Deploy report.
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