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GitLab
vs
Chef

Decision Kit

Decision Kit

Chef is a configuration management tool that enables deployment and maintenance of state for large scale infrastructure. Chef excels as managing legacy infrastructure like physical servers and VMs. Chef was designed before widespread container adoption and does not implement Kubernetes natively.

GitLab is a complete DevOps platform, delivered as a single application that includes not only configuration management, but also capabilities for project management, source code management, CI/CD, and monitoring. GitLab is designed for Kubernetes and cloud native applications.

GitLab can be used together with Chef to enable VM and bare metal configuration management. For Cloud Native applications run on Kubernetes, Chef is not required and GitLab can provide all the functionality natively.

Feature Comparison
FEATURES

Web Terminal for Web IDE

Interact with your code in a Web Terminal in the Web IDE to inspect API responses, experiment in a REPL, or compile your code.

Learn more about the Web IDE Web Terminal

AD / LDAP integration

Sync groups, manage SSH-keys, manage permissions, authentication and more. You can manage an entire GitLab instance through the LDAP / AD integration.

More information about AD / LDAP integration

Cloud Native

GitLab and its CI/CD is Cloud Native, purpose built for the cloud model. GitLab can be easily deployed on Kubernetes and used to deploy your application to Kubernetes with support out of the box.

Kubernetes integration

Auto DevOps

Auto DevOps brings DevOps best practices to your project by automatically configuring software development lifecycles by default. It automatically detects, builds, tests, deploys, and monitors applications.

Read more about Auto DevOps in the documentation

Deploy Boards

Deploy Boards offer a consolidated view of the current health and status of each CI/CD environment running on Kubernetes. The status of each pod of your latest deployment is displayed seamlessly within GitLab without the need to access Kubernetes.

Learn more about Deploy Boards

Canary Deployments

GitLab Premium can monitor your Canary Deployments when deploying your applications with Kubernetes. Canary Deployments can be configured directly through .gitlab-ci.yml, the API, or from the UI of the Deploy Boards.

Learn more about configuring Canary Deployments

Domain Specific Language

A Domain Specific Language (DSL) for defining infrastructure configuration allows thinking in resources, not files or commands to write declarative rather then procedural code.

Automated Provisioning

Find, discover, and manage bare metal and VM servers. Provision using defined polices automatically installing the correct OS or hypervisors, based on the information discovered in your environment.

Infrastructure Orchestration

Model complex infrastructures and the dependencies between distributed services and systems that make up an application or application stack using infrastructure as code. The infrastructure orchestrator uses the model to manage deployment ensuring the right services are available, at the right time, with the right information.

Configuration Modeling

CM modeling is the concept to consolidate the interactions between IT service assets, configuration items and infrastructure. Shows the interaction and relationship of services, infrastructure, and assets with each other, it will ease to find the root cause of an incident and problem.

Configuration Automation

Configure Management automation is used to make the server reach a desirable state, previously defined by provisioning scripts using a tool’s specific language and features ensuring that every system you’re responsible for is configured accurately and consistently.

Configure Monitoring

CM monitoring includes the process of recording and reporting configuration item descriptions (e.g., hardware, software, firmware, etc.) and all departures from the baseline during design and production. In the event of discovered problems, the verification of baseline configuration and approved modifications can be quickly determined.

Configure Governance

CM governance is a review that assesses compliance with established performance requirements, commercial and appropriate government standards, and functional, allocated, and product baselines. Configuration governance confirm that the system and subsystem configuration documentation complies with the functional and physical performance characteristics before acceptance into an architectural baseline.