Introduction to Chef

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 it works
 

Use recipes

to describe how you want a part of your infrastructure (such as Rails, MySQL, or Hadoop) to be configured. Then:

  • Safely, flexibly, and repeatably build and manage your entire fleet of servers
  • Rebuild your infrastructure, from scratch, automatically

Built for the Cloud
 

The cloud means change

and Chef enables you to adapt to it quickly and easily through:

  • Infrastructure awareness, allowing discovery and search across thousands of data points per system
  • Integration with Amazon EC2, the Rackspace Cloud, and more

Safety in numbers
 

Leverage the wisdom

of, and participate in, our growing community:

  • 371 individual contributors, and 74 corporations
  • Ready to use cookbooks, containing recipes for 241 common components
    • Learn about Chef

Getting Started

Hosted Chef

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Private Chef

Inside the Firewall

All the benefits of Hosted Chef, delivered with 24/7/365 support and implementation consulting, installed as enterprise software behind the corporate firewall.


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