As we saw in Chapter 2, Knife and Its Associated Plugins, Knife is one of the most widely used tools in the Chef ecosystem. Be it managing your clients, nodes, cookbooks, environments, roles, users, or handling stuff such as provisioning machines in Cloud environments such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and so on, there is a way to go about doing all of these things through Knife. However, Knife, as provided during installation of Chef, isn't capable of performing all these tasks on its own. It comes with a basic set of functionalities, which helps provide an interface between the local Chef repository, workstation and the Chef server.
The following are the functionalities, which is provided, by default, by the Knife executable:
Management of nodes
Management of clients and users
Management of cookbooks, roles, and environments
Installation of chef-client on the nodes through bootstrapping
Searching for data that is indexed on the Chef server.
However, apart from these functions...