Who killed the Chef? The case against Opscode Chef in 2020

How the serverless and cloud revolution diminished the need for static server configuration management

Source: http://www.fewbytes.com/category/blog/

Disclaimer: I am a long time Chef fan. I started using Chef in 2012 managing over 1,000 servers. This article brings me no joy to write but I feel it’s time to face facts.

“Servers managed by Chef Infra are continuously evaluated against their desired state, ensuring that configuration drift is automatically corrected, and configuration changes are universally applied.”

Chef is dead for 3 reasons:

1. In 2020, we no longer manage server states. They are immutable objects deployed on-demand. Need a patch? Deploy the new image!
2. Leaving their customers dead in the water with their new licensing model. While on the face they say its “open source” what they really mean is fork our repo and maintain the code yourself or pay for an enterprise license! Hopefully, you didn’t need or want any new features.
3. Ruby, the dying language. This is another hard pill to swallow but guess what? Enterprises don’t build things in Ruby! Java, .Net, Python and yes even Javascript.. there isn’t room for you anymore dear friend!