The chef is an open-source configuration management tool developed by the Opscode community in 2008. They launched its irst edition in January 2009. Opscode is run by individuals from the data center teams of Amazon and Microsoft. Chef supports
a variety of operating systems; it typically runs on Linux but supports Windows
7 and Windows Server too. The chef is written in Ruby and Erlang, both are real-time
programming languages.
The Chef server, workstation, and nodes are the three major components of Chef. The
Chef server stores data to configure and manage nodes effectively. A Chef workstation
works as a local Chef repository. The knife is installed on a workstation. The knife is used to upload cookbooks to a Chef server. The cookbook is a collection of recipes. Recipes execute actions that are meant to be automated. A node communicates with a Chef server and gets the configuration data related to it and executes it to install packages or to perform
any other operations for configuration management.
Most of the outages that impact the core services of business organizations are
caused by human errors during configuration changes and release management.
Chef helps software developers and engineers to manage server and application
configurations and provides for hardware or virtual resources by writing code
rather than running commands manually. Hence, it is possible to apply the best practices
of coding and design patterns to automate infrastructure. The chef was developed
to handle most critical infrastructure challenges in the current scenario; it makes
deployment of servers and applications to any physical, virtual, or cloud instances
easy. Chef transforms infrastructure to code.
Considering virtual machines in a cloud environment, we can easily visualize the
possibility of keeping versions of infrastructure and its configurations and creating
infrastructure repeatedly and proficiently. Additionally, Chef also supports system
administration, network management, and the continuous delivery of an application.
Why Chef is a preferred tool
Currently, IT operations and processes are very much based on virtual systems and
cloud deployments, which have increased the complexity and the number of systems
managed. In order to manage these types of systems and environments, we need
highly consistent, reliable, and secure automated processes. However, many existing
configuration management tools are not sufficient in the current environment; they
are actually adding complexity to an already complicated problem.
For these kinds of special scenarios, we need a tool that has built-in functionalities
and doesn't require a dedicated team of developers to maintain it. We need a
complete automated solution that must be easy to learn and can be used by
developers easily. The chef is aligned in this direction. The chef is one of the most popular
configuration management tools used by DevOps engineers across the world. To
support this argument, let's examine the salient features of Chef in the next section.
The salient features of Chef
Based on comparative analysis with Chef's competitors, the following are the salient
features of Chef, which make it an outstanding and the most popular choice among
developers in the current IT infrastructure automation scenario:
• Chef has different labors of automated solutions for current IT operations
such as Open Source Chef, Hosted Chef, and Private Chef.
• Chef enables the highly scalable, secure, and fault-tolerant automation
capability features of your infrastructure.
• Every flavor has a specific solution to handle different kinds of infrastructure
needs. For example, the Open Source Chef server is freely available for all,
but supports limited features, while the Hosted Chef server is managed
by Opscode as a service with subscription fees for standard and premium
support. The Private Chef server provides an on-premise automated solution
with a subscription price and licensing plans.
Chef has given us lexibility. According to the current industry use cases,
we can choose among Open Source, Hosted, and Private Chef server as
per our requirement.
• Chef has the facility to integrate with third-party tools such as Test Kitchen,
Vagrant, and Foodcritic. These integrations help developers to test Chef
scripts and perform proof of concept (POC) before deploying actual
automation. These tools are very useful to learn and test Chef scripting.
• Chef has a very strong community. The website, https://www.chef.io/
can help you get started with Chef and publish things. Opscode has hosted
numerous webinars, it publishes training material, and makes it very easy for
developers to contribute to new patches and releases.
• Chef can quickly handle all types of traditional dependencies and manual
processes of the entire network.
• Chef has a strong dependency management approach, which means that
only the sequence of order matters and all dependencies would be met if
they are specified in the proper order.
• Chef is well suited for cloud instances, and it is the irst choice of developers
who are associated with cloud infrastructure automation. Therefore, demand
for Chef automation is growing exponentially. Within a short span of time,
Chef has acquired a good market reputation and reliability.
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