What exactly is Chef

Question

I’m not in the Devops field or anything related, but I like how it ties everything together. Going through this sub and a lot of job reqs for Devops, I see Chef mentioned a lot. I did read the documentation and everything I could, but everything kind of went over my head. Is there a good ELI5 explanation of Chef? Generally put, I know its purpose is to automate large-scale infrastructure but what on earth does that mean? What do I need to build to utilize/use Chef – an app, or server?

Answer 1

Chef is a tool that helps automate the process of setting up and managing large-scale computer systems, like servers or cloud instances. It allows you to write code (in a language called "Ruby") that defines the configuration of your system, including things like which software to install, how to set up user accounts, and what configuration files to use.

Once you've written your code, you can use Chef to apply those configurations to any number of machines at once, making it much easier to manage and maintain a large infrastructure.

To use Chef, you'll need to have access to the machines you want to manage (either physical or virtual), and you'll need to install the Chef client software on those machines. You'll also need to set up a "Chef server" to store and manage the configuration code and data.

In short, Chef is a tool that helps automate the process of setting up and managing large-scale computer systems, and you'll need to have access to the machines you want to manage and a Chef server to use it effectively.

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