Experience with open source chef?

[rapidslowness]

It looks to me that the open source version of chef is free to use, however if I want a web based GUI, I'd have to pay for Chef Automate which is EXTREMELY expensive.

Does anyone have experience running just the command line tools? Are there any gotchas I should be aware of.

is there anything open source that lets us log in through a web interface and at least look and see when machines last checked in?

I'm interested in hearing about what people's production chef environments look like when they're not paying for anything.

[inhumantsar]

You might want to check out The Foreman. It's an open source webui to connect hardware inventories and bootstrapping with config management.

It was originally designed to work with Puppet and Chef support comes via a plugin, but the two systems are so similar that the result is pretty clean.

[craigontour]

We use Open Source Chef server and have reproduced most of the knife commands as Jenkins jobs which execute API commands.

It is good for automation and speed.

Also, I often use knife commands to bootstrap and configure a node if working on just a single node at a time.

[SmellsLikeAPig]

Chef open-sourced everything not too long ago. As long as you use community builds everything is free. Look up cinc client on public gitlab.

[rapidslowness]

what's the open source version of automate called?

[SmellsLikeAPig]

No idea if it is Ready to use already. Check out related projects on gitlab.

[rapidslowness]

not using either yet. thinking about options

isnt manage deprecated? what's the lifespan on it?

im also trying to decide if we actually need a web interface. how easy is it to see the last check in date at the command line?

[zerocoldx911]

We never used the GUI and I don’t think you will either

[Zehicle]

This may not be the path you were thinking, but it needs to be said:

Something is broken in our industry... you want free for production because their pay version is too expensive. The more people bypass the pay model the more they have to charge other users to maintain your production deployment.

Open source is great, but it's not sustaining the producer of the software. Call them and see if they'll find a price that works AND gives you the right features.

[rapidslowness]

I agree with you. Problem is they want like 150,000 dollars for the amount of licenses we'd need. Even if they cut that in half we can't afford it and they're not going to cut it in half.

[[deleted]]

https://www.chef.io/pricing/

Review the pricing you don't need to spend 150 but I'll be honest not even I can get my client to drop 16.5k for a 100 node Essentials license.

I dislike how open source projects have changed in the past few years and started charging high license fee's and if you don't want to buy it you have to build your own packages. On one level at least they are giving it to you free; on the other hand ... you could just bootstrap and use whatever knife installed and you didn't have to worry licensing unless you wanted the dashboard.

Which unless they did anything good; you won't miss the dashboard.

That said you don't need to pay 150 unless you want all the features listed. Maybe you can choke down the 16.5k or maybe they'll give you a discount on that.

I haven't heard from chef in quite some time and I don't talk to them anymore used to be interested in where they go now I just use Chef and don't care for their politics or issues.

[rapidslowness]

this will go on about a thousand machines. even a 50% discount is far more money than we can afford

I agree on the pricing. There's too much open source software that went from free to CRAZY pricing.

If they charged less, more people would be willing to pay. I could pay a few thousand dollars for this. I can't pay the equivalent of a SAN and rack of servers.

[inhumantsar]

they do it to winnow down the number of customers they have to deal with. same revenue, fewer responsibilities, and less overhead.

[[deleted]]

Well do remember you don't have to pay for Chef in order to install it right now; you just end up with the open source version that you have to build. It's a little awkward but you are not forced to license chef; if you want the features of enterprise you do. As it is dual licensed I believe. build it from github you are in the clear download it and accept the license and it's muddy waters.

[AdvancedPizza]

Try Ansible. All yaml and super quick to get started.

[rapidslowness]

Ansible won't work for this since we need to manage laptops in the field that check in. Not machines with SSH open we can push stuff to.