Reality-Based automation for the Cloud.

Chef is an open-source systems integration framework built specifically for automating the cloud. No matter how complex the realities of your business, Chef makes it easy to deploy servers and scale applications throughout your entire infrastructure. Because it combines the fundamental elements of configuration management and service oriented architectures with the full power of Ruby, Chef makes it easy to create an elegant, fully automated infrastructure.

How Chef Works

You write "recipes" that describe how you want a part of your server (such as Apache, MySQL, or Hadoop) to be configured. These recipes describe a series of resources that should be in a particular state - packages that should be installed, services that should be running, or files that should be written. Chef makes sure each resource is properly configured, and gives you a safe, flexible, easily-repeatable mechanism for making sure your servers are always running exactly the way you want them to.

Why Chef Works

Most infrastructure solutions force you to adapt to their "one-size-fits-all" approaches, even though every infrastructure challenge is different. That's crazy-talk. And it's precisely the reason why Chef is built directly on top of Ruby, a dynamic, open-source programming language, integrated with well-known cloud platforms like Rackspace and EC2, and built to seamlessly integrate into your existing environment. We designed Chef from the ground up to allow you to focus on solving your real business problems - because reality is chaotic enough. Dealing with it shouldn't be.

Set it. And Forget It.

Chef is infrastructure aware – when you add new servers, Chef automatically discovers thousands of data points about your system. When you need to know which web servers to load balance in production, you simply ask Chef – no need to change source code, or manually reconfigure based on static documentation. When you need to model new classes of data, from users to virtual machines, simply use the Chef API to store the information, and re-use the data instantly.

Modeling That's Truly Meaningful

Chef allows you to create perfect clones of QA environments, pre-production environments, partner preview environments and more. Once automated, you hold a blueprint for your infrastructure, enabling you to build, or rebuild, automatically in minutes or hours – not weeks or months. Better still, when you take those environments live and reality intrudes - which, trust us, it will - Chef gives you endless flexibility to adapt on the fly. We all know business is "a series of managed disasters." Chef gives you the power to deal with them quickly, accurately and intelligently.

Your Problems, Your Solutions

Other solutions impose their model on your process. But who knows your problems best, you or them? Chef allows you to automate your current processes - your model, your decisions.

Stand on the shoulders of giants

Choose from over 250 battle-hardened cookbooks incorporating best practices from throughout the industry.