Progress Chef vs. SUSE Manager

Chef is a very nice tool for establishing and maintaining a consistent configuration across a range of servers. In addition, Automate allows the continued monitoring and maintenance of servers so they don't drift from established standards. Overall, it deals very well with complex systems. Chef is slightly less applicable for a micro-services approach where the servers are replicated from a simple and known starting point.

Incentivized

In our specific use case, SUSE Manager is extremely useful. We're having a large landscape that is divided into intake, development, quality and production with a couple of different SUSE flavours that need to be automatically rolled out, configured, patched and maintained, everything from up to date repositories that are cloned on a daily basis straight from SUSE.

Incentivized

• Chef is very easy to learn. Written in ruby, Chef code is high enough level for non-ruby coders to get a general idea of what the script is doing.
• Chef can be a one stop shop for writing code, testing infrastructure, and deployment of applications.
• The Chef support team is very helpful in their auto manager support as well as active support in their Slack channels from development engineers & architects.

Incentivized

• Manage the content lifecycle of our products over multiple environments.
• Use salt to its fullest extent, including pre-generated states that make installation and configuration very easy.
• Manage repositories.
• Make it easy to audit our own infrastructure.
• Make it easy to bootstrap new systems.

Incentivized

• One main concern with Chef is the maintainability of Chef master.
• The Chef-client should be installed on every node we want to do any automation.
• It is mostly Ruby and there's a learning curve. Need to understand the fundamentals of Chef very throughly to play around with attributes, templates etc etc.
• The Chef-client agent needs to be run on the nodes frequently to update the details of it state to master. And also to index the nodes based on tags.

Incentivized

• The cloning of patches when using the content lifecycle module in a multi-environment landscape with many SLES flavours is a bit cumbersome.
• More premade saltstate for default applications are always nice to have.
• Upgrading SUMA could be easier, especially when a Postgres upgrade is also required.

Incentivized

I am expanding the use of SUSE Manager throughout our organization and can't imagine going back to the "wild wild west" we had before.

The suite of tools is very powerful. The ability to create custom modules allows for unlimited potential for managing all aspects of a system. However, there is pretty significant learning curve with the toolset. It currently takes approx 3-4 months for new engineers to feel comfortable with our implementation

Incentivized

The gui is extremely user friendly. The installation and configuration does have a learning curve, it takes a while to set everything up. But once you're passed this initial learning curve, everything is very intuitive. If you want extra automation, there's an api (eventough i personally find the documentation of the api could be ordered better). I gave this product a 9 because of the initial learning curve and the api documentation, but for the rest it suits my needs perfectly.

Incentivized

It loads quick enough for basically all our systems. Because we have this for local dev environments, speed isn't really a big issue here. Yes, depending on the system, sometimes it does take a relatively long time, but it's not an issue for me. One thing that is annoying is that if I want to make a small change to a cookbook and re-run the Chef client, I can't just make the change in the cache and run it. I have to do the whole process of updating the server.

Incentivized

Support for Chef is easily available for fee or through the open source community as most the issues you will face will have been addressed through the Chef developer community forums. The documentation for Chef is moderate to great and easily readable.

Incentivized

SUSE Manager provided a top-tier support person on site to us for two days to help integration. We did all the standard stuff they help with before he arrived. We were able to use him to get all the tricky stuff identified and solved in the short time we had. Had they sent us a lower-tier guy, it would have been a waste. I was impressed they sent such knowledgeable person.

Chef is the more developer-oriented of the three main tools in this space. It has a steeper learning curve as a result but it allows you to do more. Puppet seems to be more geared towards automated the management of the operating system. Ansible is an excellent tool but requires you to allow SSH connectivity into all of your instances.

Incentivized

The other competitors also have a good platform and service, but we went with SUSE due to cost. The price was best and we needed to keep under a certain budget. The functionality was perfect for what we needed so we took the step forward. This allows us to manage our Linux environment within the manager and update or deploy specific tasks to each as needed.

Incentivized

• We can deploy tens to hundreds of servers in a small amount of time.
• We can grow our infrastructure very quickly with limited resources adjusting to customer demand as soon as the need arises.
• We are able to automate many of the mundane tasks that used to occupy the time of our engineers allowing us to focus on more critical tasks.

Incentivized

• Manages patch levels for most Linux OS by: date, group, cloud or custom channels
• Make it easy to audit our own infrastructure.
• Allows the joining of groups inside SUSE Manager to quickly access or work with servers so grouped.
• 24/7 support team.
• Automatic deployment.

Incentivized