Chef server facilitates with a quicker way to deploy a complete environment instead of any single machine. We have already discussed that with Chef-Solo, we can configure any single machine. As our infrastructure grows, it becomes difficult to handle operations. Configuration management tools are designed to manage a large infrastructure with several machines.

Chef server is a hub of configurations, cookbooks, node information, and policies. Metadata describes each registered node that is managed by chef-client. Nodes ask chef-client for configuration details from the Chef server. Recipes, templates, and file distributions are saved on the central Chef server. Moreover, Chef server provides an API to send and receive configuration details on the fly.

There are mainly four components of Chef server shown in the following diagram:

Bookshelf

Bookshelf is used to store cookbooks and resolve the cookbook's dependencies. If any cookbook or a file is declared twice, Bookshelf keeps track...