Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The components of the Chef Development Kit help support you as you write Chef code on
your development workstation. Chef Server provides additional components to help scale
your configuration management capabilities to hundreds or thousands of servers, and bey-
ond.
Why Chef Might Be a Good Tool for Your Enterprise
When Adam Jacob first created Chef in 2009, he had three key insights to address the short-
comings he saw in other configuration management tools:
1. A configuration management tool should easily enable web IT, providing first-class
support for managing cloud infrastructure.
2. Everyone's infrastructure is unique. Complex, enterprise infrastructures benefit
greatly from being able to model their IT infrastructure and application delivery pro-
cess as code.
3. Great tools and ideas also come out of a vibrant and involved user community. You
can't do it alone.
Over time with community support, Chef has evolved to have a powerful set of features that
make it unique among configuration management tools:
Extreme scalability
Customers such as Facebook
use Chef to manage tens of thousands of servers
using only
a handful of employees.
Power
Chef is built on top of the Ruby programming language. When you need it, you have full
access to the power of Ruby to customize Chef.
Choice
You are not locked into one way of using Chef. Chef can operate in a distributed stan-
dalone mode or in a centralized mode requiring a server. There are also options to use
pull or push models (or both) for deployment.
