Achieve speed, scale, and consistency by automating your infrastructure with Chef
Turn your infrastructure into code
With Chef you can manage servers – 5 or 5,000 of them – by turning your infrastructure into code. Time-consuming activities like manual patching, configuration updates, and service installations for every server will no longer exist. And your Infrastructure becomes flexible, version-able, human-readable, and testable.
Create.
Configuration Policy
Chef provides an easy to learn DSL that lets you define your infrastructure as code. This makes your system configurations more testable, portable, and auditable than with traditional run books or shell scripts, giving teams the freedom to focus on building new innovations, rather than re-solving old problems.
Repeatable Processes
Chef resources have built-in validations to ensure that configurations are only changed if a system diverges from the desired state you define. This “test and repair” behavior allows you apply configurations across your estate at a regular cadence, without spending time applying updates to systems that are already properly configured.
Customizable Behavior
Chef is made up of a plethora of declarative resources that cover most day-to-day infrastructure concerns. Every environment is different, however, and with Chef, you can customize behavior for different environments, datacenters, or hardware profiles without having to re-write policies for each permutation. There’s even a framework for creating completely new resources for the tasks that are truly unique to your organization.
Converge.
During Development
The Chef Development Kit includes tools for testing your configuration updates on local workstations, dedicated development infrastructure, or ephemeral cloud instances. Whatever your environment, Chef helps you ensure the same methodologies are used whether you’re in development or production. Paired with Inspec, you can even validate that your changes behaved as expected early, before they’re released to production.
In Production
Each system you manage can be configured to run the chef client regularly, which will pull the policies you define from a Chef Server, apply them locally, and send back a summary of their run. The Chef Server then becomes your source of truth — a single place where updates can be made, and automatically pulled in by the systems you manage the next time they check in.
Across Complex Environments
The Chef Server stores information about each system it manages, and indexes that data for search. This provides a means to create truly dynamic interactions between nodes, where they can query for information about their peers and take action accordingly. Instead of maintaining hard-coded lists of hosts, you can have load balancers dynamically add new servers as they’re created, monitoring systems auto-generate configs based on server roles, and much, much more.
Collaborate.
Aggregated Audit History
Chef Automate aggregates data about all systems you manage with chef, even across multiple Chef Servers, in one dashboard that can be searched or filtered according to your needs. With a full history of changes that have been applied, a trend graph of system health, and corresponding compliance dashboard, Chef Automate provides a single pane of glass into changes across your estate.
Variable Granularity
Chef Automate gives you access to the level of detail you need, whether you’re an executive, practitioner, or anything in between. Each dashboard provides high level health information about your estate, with the ability to drill into each node, run list, or even individual resource that was run on each converge. Whether you just want to confirm your nodes are checking in successfully, or need to drill into error details for troubleshooting, Automate provides everything you need in one place.
Continuous Delivery
Chef Automate’s Workflow allows you to create a formal delivery pipeline for all your Chef code. Workflow provides a prescriptive set of stages for code promotion, and built-in tools for enforcing code review, approval, dependency management, and automated testing make it easier than ever for large teams to release changes safely, without losing momentum in their automation efforts.
Do more with Chef
Chef Automate provides enterprise capabilities that let you do even more with Chef. Chef Automate includes a continuous deployment pipeline for infrastructure and applications, automated testing for compliance and security, as well as dashboards and reports for troubleshooting, auditing and management. Make better, faster deployment decisions by putting reliable and timely information at the fingertips of decision makers. Achieve safety and velocity with Chef Automate.
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“Chef provided an automation solution flexible enough to bend to our scale dynamics without requiring us to change our workflow.”
– Phil Dibowitz. Production Engineer
Chef Technical Resources
Technical Docs
- Chef General
Learn More - Chef Server
Learn More - Chef DK
Learn More - Chef Client
Learn More - Chef Cookbooks
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Hands-On Learning
- Infrastructure Automation
Learn More - Local Development and Testing
Learn More - Developer Essentials
Learn More - Writing Cookbooks
Learn More - Extending Chef
Learn More - Administering a Chef Installation
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