DevOps Articles

Open Source Chef vs Hosted Chef vs. On Premises Chef | UpGuard

Learn about new features, changes, and improvements to UpGuard: Chef is one of the most widely-used CM tools today, arguably playing second fiddle to the mighty Puppet. Two versions of Chef exist: the free, open source tool and the enterprise offering, which is then subdivided into hosted and on-premises (private) versions.

Another point to keep in mind is that as a publicly exposed cloud service, Hosted Chef is vulnerable-- as are all externally-facing cloud services-- to nasty experiences over which one has no control like service outages and DDOS attacks.

With the release of Chef 11 in 2013, On Premises Chef has shifted away from a perpetual-license model to a monthly, per node model costing $6 per node/month-- the same as Hosted Chef.

As one of the most widely-used solutions for managing system configurations and automating IT environments, Chef currently offers three deployment options, each with their own caveats: Hosted Chef, On Premise (Private) Chef, and Open Source Chef.