About Chef
Chef is an open-source software package that is developed by Chef Software, Inc. The software package is a systems and cloud infrastructure automation framework that deploys servers and applications to any physical, virtual, or cloud location, no matter the size of the infrastructure. Each organization consists of one or more workstations, a single server, and every node that the chef-client has configured and is maintaining. Cookbooks and recipes are used to tell the chef-client how each node should be configured. The chef-client, which is installed on every node, does the actual configuration.
A Chef cookbook is the fundamental unit of configuration and policy distribution. A cookbook defines a scenario and contains everything that is required to support that scenario, including libraries, recipes, files, and more. A Chef recipe is a collection of property definitions for setting state on the device. The details for checking and setting these property states are abstracted away so that a recipe may be used for more than one operating system or platform. While recipes are commonly used for defining configuration settings, they also can be used to install software packages, copy files, start services, and more.
The following references provide more information from Chef:
Topic |
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Chef home |
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Chef overview |
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Chef documentation (all) |