Whether you have five or five thousand servers, Chef lets you manage
them all by turning infrastructure into code. Infrastructure described
as code is flexible, versionable, human-readable, and testable. Whether
your infrastructure is in the cloud, on-premises or in a hybrid environment,
you can easily and quickly adapt to your business's changing needs with Chef.
The Components of Chef and How It Works
Chef Development Kit
The Chef DK
gives you the tools you need to develop and test your infrastructure automation
code locally from your workstation, before deploying changes into production.
For example, the
Test Kitchen tool lets you run tests in an isolated environment. Chef DK
also includes InSpec,
a powerful language for writing infrastructure tests. Download Chef DK
Chef Server
The
Chef Server acts as a central repository for cookbooks as well as for information
about every node it manages.
Chef cookbooks contain
code that describes the desired state of your infrastructure. Download Server
Chef Client
A node is any physical
or virtual machine in your network that is managed by the Chef server. The
Chef client runs
on each node and securely communicates with the Chef server to get the latest
configuration instructions. The Chef client uses the instructions to bring the
node to its desired state. Download Client