The most valuable feature is its easy configuration management, optimization abilities, complete infrastructure and application automation, and its superiority over other similar tools. It smoothly integrates with CI processes and helps reduce manual errors in system management and configuration. It is an effective and user-friendly tool for automating IT infrastructure and applications.

Its versatility is the most valuable feature. It's not necessarily the end all or be all solution for configuration management, deployment, etc. However, for what we use it for, it fits right in and it doesn't bloat our infrastructure (or any of our instances) that we deployed to.

It has been very easy to tie it into our build and deploy automation for production release work, etc. All the Chef pieces more or less run themselves.

One advantage Chef has over Ansible is your operations can be entirely headless, meaning that they can interact directly with the Chef database using shared credentials. It never uses any type of human-readable interface. Therefore, you don't have to go into a GUI nor use a command line tool. You can hit the database directly with a library.

With Ansible, a lot of the operations require that you have some type of frontward-facing tool in order for it to perform, e.g., command line or a GUI available. For a smaller scale operation, if you're managing fewer than 100 nodes, this might be fine, as it might be more helpful if you can transfer some of the power over to your developers in order to perform certain operations.

However, if you're handy enough with DSL and you can present your own front-facing interface to your developers, then you can actually have a lot more granular control with Chef in operations over what developers can perform and what they can't.

Chef is a great tool for an automation person who wants to do configuration management with infrastructure as a code.

Chef recipes are easy to write and move across different servers and environments. 

The features are good in Chef, especially its compliance feature. It's very good and it's what I found most valuable in the tool.

Its most valuable feature is automation.

The product is useful for automating processes.

The most valuable features for us would be the writing of the recipes. Any business can write the recipe based on their deployment, it's not like we have to follow a specific path. 

AWS Marketplace gives you a sense of authentic products. Since AWS does its own checks on the marketplace products it's kind of a sense of relief that something will not be problematic.

Writing recipes, which is great. Any business can write a recipe based on their deployment. We do not have to follow a path.

It is simple, easy to use, and versatile. The most important thing is it can handle a 100,000 servers at the same time easily with no time constraints.

The best are some of the default, out-of-the-box capabilities that are available. Plug-ins with multiple vendors and other infra-cloud platforms. The templates are very easy to use. Ease of use, overall, is an advantage of Chef.

The most valuable feature is automation. 

Configuration management is the most useful feature and is used by everyone. Provisioning is also an important feature. Since Chef collects a lot of inventory using Ohai, the inventory can also be used to integrate with third-party tools.

Although deployment can be done a lot better with other tools on the market, Chef also accomplishes this. However, remember that rollback can be problematic here.

Automation is everything. Having so many servers in production, many of our processes won't work nor scale. So, we look for tools to help us automate the process, and Chef is one of them.

The community.

The most valuable feature is the language that it uses: Ruby.

Regarding integration and configuration of the product, they're pretty manageable. The layers are really easy to configure.