Top 10 Reasons Not To Use Chef

Several years ago after taking a new VPE role, I heard my system administrators throwing around foreign terms like “converging nodes”, “cookbooks”, “knife”, and “recipes.” I had never used Chef, and had the distinct feeling I’d walked into a high tech kitchen. Over the next few weeks, I sought to make sense of our Chef investment, and it wasn’t long though before I was hooked. Over the coming months, the size of our cloud computing infrastructure would triple (700+ servers, 1.5+ PB storage), and Chef became an essential component to managing our growth.

But I know managing cloud infrastructure with Chef is not for everyone. So for those of you not using Chef, here are the top 10 reasons to support your decision.

#10 - You’ve Never Met a Server You Wanted To Configure the Same Way Twice

Your servers are like children: each unique and special in its own way. Chef would not only turn all your children into identical clones of each other, but also force them to remain identical after they go out into the world. Is that a fair way to treat your children?