Learning Chef

Chapter 1. Configuration Management and Chef

Chef is a configuration management tool for information technology (IT) professionals, like you. Because there are a wide variety of definitions for the term configuration management, let’s take a moment to explain what configuration management means in the context of this book and why you need a configuration management tool. We’ll also cover what Chef is, and why you need it as well.

What Is Configuration Management?

With respect to IT, configuration management covers the set of engineering practices for managing the following entities involved in delivering software applications to consumers:

• Hardware
• Software
• Infrastructure
• People
• Process

Configuration management came about to address the fundamental challenges involved in doing group work. Managing change when you are a lone system administrator with a handful of servers to manage is relatively straightforward. Trying to coordinate the work of multiple system administrators and developers involving hundreds, or even thousands, of servers and applications to support a large customer base is complex and typically requires the support of a tool.

A modern IT configuration management tool usually involves an implementation inspired by the automation and policy-based theory originally developed by Mark Burgess. He developed the following core ideas of this theory for automating IT when he was a professor at Oslo University College in the late 1990s and early 2000s:

• Changes must be handled ...