Progress Software Corporation is an American company that develops software for creating and deploying business applications. Their vision is to propel business forward in a technology-driven world.
Chef is an open source systems integration framework and configuration management system. Chef provides a Ruby library and API that can be used to bring the benefits of configuration management to an entire infrastructure. It runs under Linux.
If you’re looking to move away from products developed by Progress, let’s explore the finest open source alternatives.
1. Ansible
Ansible automates software provisioning, configuration management, cloud provisioning, ad-hoc task execution, network automation, and multi-node orchestration, and application deployment. It can configure systems, deploy software, and orchestrate more advanced IT tasks such as continuous deployments or zero downtime rolling updates.
Ansible is a radically simple IT automation platform. Unlike Chef, Ansible uses an agentless architecture where no agents are installed on remote systems.
2. Salt
Salt (sometimes called the SaltStack Platform) is a Python-based open-source configuration management software and remote execution engine.
This software offers a different approach to infrastructure management built on a dynamic communication bus. Salt is used for data-driven orchestration, remote execution for any infrastructure, configuration management for any app stack, and much more. It’s easy to setup, understand, and extend.
3. Puppet
Puppet offers an automatic way to inspect, deliver, operate and future-proof software, regardless where it runs. It’s a very comprehensive tool with core configuration management capabilities and functionality out-of-the-box.
The software allows system administrators to centrally manage every important aspect of a system using a cross-platform specification language that manages all the separate elements normally aggregated in different files, like users, cron jobs, and hosts, along with obviously discrete elements like packages, services, and files.
For more good open source configuration management tools read this roundup.
All articles in this series:
| Alternatives to Progress's Products | |
|---|---|
| Chef is an open source systems integration framework and configuration management system. Chef provides a Ruby library and API that can be used to bring the benefits of configuration management to an entire infrastructure. |
| LoadMaster is a fully featured load balancer and application delivery controller (ADC) that supports all the major application workloads with easy-to-use templates. |
| MOVEit is a managed file transfer software product. The software encrypts files and uses file transfer protocols such as FTP(S) or SFTP to transfer data, as well as providing automation services, analytics and failover options. |
 | ShareFile is a secure content collaboration, file sharing and sync software. It’s designed to handle document workflows for any size team. It has built-in security features to protect files. |
| Sitefinity is a content management system (CMS) that you use to create, store, manage, and present content on your website. |
 | WS_FTP is a secure FTP client that provides reliable and secure transfer of critical files. WS_FTP consists of an FTP server and an FTP client. |