The Chef Server acts as a hub for configuration data. The Chef Server stores cookbooks, the policies that are applied to cookbooks, and metadata that describes each registered node in the infrastructure. Nodes use the chef-client to ask the Chef Server for configuration details, such as recipes, templates, and file distributions. The chef-client then does as much of the configuration work as possible on the nodes themselves (and not on the Chef Server). This scalable approach distributes the configuration effort throughout the organization.
There are three types of Chef servers:
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Hosted Chef is a version of a Chef Server that is hosted by Opscode. Hosted Chef is cloud-based, scalable, and available (24x7/365), with resource-based access control. Hosted Chef has all of the automation capabilities of Chef, but without requiring it to be set up and managed from behind the firewall. Hosted Chef evolved out of a need for an infrastructure management tool to be built around the notion of API primitives. By using an API to talk to a cloud provider (such as Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, Windows Azure, or Rackspace), it allows the freedom to think of those primitives as building blocks. Hosted Chef evolved out of this idea. Chef only needs to know about the desired state, how it should get there, and what the proper functionality of that desired state should be. |
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Private Chef is a version of a Chef Server that is designed to provide all of the infrastructure automation capabilities of Chef, set up and managed from within the organization. Private Chef evolved out of a need for customers to have the same functionality provided by Hosted Chef, but located within the organization’s firewall. Private Chef is the same as Hosted Chef. Hosted Chef is the largest Private Chef deployment in the world. |
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The open source Chef Server is a free version of the Chef Server that contains much of the same functionality as Hosted Chef, but requires that each instance be configured and managed locally, including performing data migrations, applying updates to the open source Chef Server, and ensuring that the open source Chef Server scales as the local infrastructure it is supporting grows. The open source Chef Server includes support from the Chef community, but does not include support directly from Opscode. |