As with any other technology, Chef has its own set of terminologies which are used to identify the various components of the Chef ecosystem. The following are some key terms along with their definitions that are used throughout this book:
Node: A node is a system that is managed by Chef. These can be servers, desktop systems, routers, or anything else that is capable of running the Chef client and has a supported operating system.
Workstation: A workstation is a special node that is used by a system administrator to interact with the Chef server and with nodes. This is where the command-line tools are executed, specifically the
knife
command-line tool.Bootstrap: Bootstrap is the process of setting up a node to be used as a Chef client. This involves performing any work required to install the dependencies for Chef as well as Chef itself.
Bootstrap script: There are a number of possible ways to install Chef, Ruby, and other core requirements as well as any additional...