Progress Chef has pioneered the DevOps movement, providing enterprise-grade automation solutions for almost two decades. If you’re here, it means that you have zeroed in on Chef for your DevOps solution or consider it a noteworthy contender for solving your infrastructure automation.
As you know, Chef is built upon an open-source core, which means that many of its solutions are being used by the open-source community. However, the open-source version of Chef has certain limitations and restricted use cases. On the other hand, Progress offers an enterprise version of Chef that caters to organizations of all sizes.
But if you are still unsure about the practicality of choosing Enterprise Chef over Community Chef, or if you cannot decide, this blog will provide you with the necessary information and directions to make an informed decision.
Enterprise and Community Chef Defined
Before we get into the nitty-gritty, let's first understand what each of these versions means. Enterprise Chef is the commercial offering of Chef. This version builds upon the core functionalities of open-source Chef, with additional advanced features, timely support and enhanced capabilities. On the other hand, Community Chef is the open-source version of Chef. Some of the unavailable features in this version include a graphical user interface (GUI), an analytics dashboard, a bulk grouping tool, customizable views, push functionality and more.
Why Choose Between the Two?
Selecting a DevOps solution for your organization can be stressful. After all, IT managers may prioritize analyzing what they feel is best. However, when you are presented with options between community and enterprise versions of the same software, understand that technical debt is real and priorities such as scale, efficiency and support come into play, especially if you are a growing organization.
A lot of questions may come to mind.
Will the community-driven version give us only the bare minimum? Does the enterprise version take care of our future needs, too? Should we rely on community support or opt for SLA-backed support? How is security taken care of in the community version? Is the version compliant with standard norms? How will we be affected by third-party dependencies? What happens when Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) are found?
The list goes on. As you can see, making an optimal choice isn’t that easy. That's why we’ve created a list of important factors for you to compare. We request that you analyze what's provided and make an informed decision.
Seven Factors to Consider for Comparison
As the name suggests, Community Chef is the open-source version driven by the community. It’s available via different sources, free, and backed by a few channels. Enterprise Chef is versatile; it builds upon the open-source foundation, checks vital security boxes, is licensed and hence accountable, paid but with definite ROI, on-premises and in the cloud.
Here are seven aspects to compare Enterprise Chef scores with the Community version.
1. Security and Compliance – The Extra Dose
Enterprise Chef provides an extra dose of security with faster patching for known CVEs, prompt incident response and proactive security measures like security scans and compliance checks. Additionally, it maintains the integrity of distributions in the supply chain by thoroughly scrutinizing its dependencies.
As a compliance management automation solution, Enterprise Chef provides 100+ compliance profiles. It enables you to create custom profiles tailored to your unique requirements. The enterprise version of Chef allows you to define automated remediation actions for security vulnerabilities, helping to achieve faster response time and reduce the risk window for attackers. You can get insight into the compliance status of your entire IT estate with the help of in-depth reports on compliance checks, infrastructure configuration and security posture.
2. Steadfast Support – 24/7
All Enterprise Chef customers are entitled to support. Participating in the SLA-driven Chef support system can facilitate fast and reliable remediation. A premium support tier provides 24/7 support, while standard support is provided depending on the severity of the issue. Chef customers will have access to additional content and communications channels according to the Chef Support tier to which they have subscribed. Community Chef does not include standard support.
3. SLA-Based Incident Response and Security Fixes
With Enterprise Chef, customers have SLAs tied to incident response and security fixes. For instance, one of our customers, a leading BFSI institution, sponsored a concert by a well-known American singer-songwriter. However, they experienced issues with web servers managing the concert operations.
Being enterprise customers, they called on the services of their Chef Customer Architect (a certified Chef professional for enterprise customers), who found the root cause in their custom code. They also received guidance and consultation on best practices to avoid such errors in the future. This was an incident where Chef went beyond its service scope to help the customer escape a sticky situation. With Community Chef, support is limited to only community channels like Slack.
Being part of the premium support tier enables you to get 24/7 support with a response time of just 30 minutes for Severity 1 issues, which may not be the case with community-driven support. Progress also provides onsite support for Severity 1 issues on a case-by-case basis.
4. Chef Professional Services
Enterprise users who opt for our professional services receive services tailored to their unique needs. From deploying Chef in your environment or migrating to a different environment, Chef Professional Services offers bespoke solutions that range from consultancy-based projects to managed delivery models. In certain cases, a technical liaison will take care of your specific needs.
5. Everything on Cloud with Chef SaaS
If you don’t want to go through the hassle of installing and maintaining your Chef environment, Chef provides you a managed solution in Chef SaaS. This means you can offload the installation/setup and maintenance to Progress, which will help reduce operational costs and deliver faster time to value. Additionally, your environment gets updated on the latest version, new features and patch updates for bugs and CVE fixes. Chef SaaS is also available in High Availability mode (HA). Note that Chef SaaS is available only for Enterprise users.
6. Priority Access to Anything New!
All enterprise users of Chef get constant and timely communication from Chef regarding updates, releases and new features. You will be promptly informed of planned outages and CVE and vendor outage information through various communication channels. Enterprise customers can be offered early access to test beta releases of upcoming products or features. For instance, the Progress Chef 360 platform is the future forward path for Chef. Enterprise customers will be offered early access to test its beta release. Community Chef must rely on the website, community channels and third-party news to get information about new updates.
7. Integrate with Confidence
In the Enterprise edition of Chef, we manage the security and compatibility of third-party integrations such as PostgreSQL, Java bundles, NGINX and OpenSearch, which means that an EOL of bundled dependencies will be taken care of by Chef. On the other hand, Chef Automate (only present in Enterprise Chef) offers pre-formatted data for integration with other tools like monitoring platforms or ticketing systems. For example, a licensed version of Chef Automate will provide readily consumable data on server configuration, resource utilization and potential issues. This allows you to create dashboards and alerts within your monitoring platform easily.
These are some of the features and factors that we deemed fit for comparing the Enterprise and Community editions of Chef. Numerous other rationales can be factored in while comparing the two. For instance, Progress cannot provide any upgrade or support for the community distributions; users will have to depend entirely on the community to confirm that they are using the latest and greatest version of Chef. For everything related to Chef— installation, maintenance, support, patch updates and version upgrades— you must turn to the community or have an experienced SME in-house.
The community edition of Chef might be the right choice for performing tasks for simple use cases where the impact on cost and revenue is not significant. But, if you’re a growing enterprise concerned about security and technical debt, we suggest deploying Enterprise Chef to administer, maintain and support your infrastructure needs.
We are providing you with more resources to help you to learn more on which edition of Chef will be the right choice.
- Check out this webpage to learn more about Enterprise and Community Chef
- The Enterprise vs Community Chef Guide: Learn more in details about which edition of Chef will be best suited for your needs.
- The CISO’s Handbook: Learn more about the security aspects of Enterprise and Community edition of Chef to decide which one should you choose.