Chef

Mature Open Source configuration management tool developed by Opscode written in Ruby and Erlang.

Chef Architecture

Chef Workstaton

• The Chef Workstations is the System Administrators PC
• He writes Recipes in Ruby that are compiled into a Cookbook
• A Cookbook is a collection of Recipes and defines how are Nodes are set up (A bunch of servers)
• Knife is the CLI tool used to sends the Cookbook to the Chef Server

Chef Server

• The Chef Server stores Cookbooks and can be hosted on localhost or remotely
• The Server also provides tools to drive node configurations

Chef Node

• These are the systems to be configured
• The OHAI service fetches the current state of the Nodes and sends it to the Chef Client
• The Chef Client communicates with the Chef Server

Chef Flavours

• Chef Client/Server: Traditional Chef Architecture
• Chef Solo: Cookbooks are located at the Local Site
• Hosted Chef: The Server is a Service in the Cloud
• Private Chef: Enterprise Version of Chef

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Pros

• Mature Solution for heterogenous environments
• Lots of recipes available

Cons

• Requires learning Ruby
• Master doesn’t have much control, the entire network communicates

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Chef Commands

chef generate cookbook sample
knife cookbook upload sample
# connect server and node
knife bootstrap NODE_IP --ssh-user root --ssh-password SSH_PWD --node-name chef_node