Chef is a popular configuration management tool used to configure and maintain servers. It was created by the company named Chef and is written in Ruby and Erlang. It was initially released in January 2009 and is offered in two different versions – free (open source) and paid (enterprise).
Chef supports and integrates with many cloud platforms such as Amazon EC2, OpenStack, Rackspace, and Microsoft Azure. Chef can be run in solo mode (no dependencies) or in client/server mode, where the client communicates with the server and sends information about the node that it's installed on.
Chef uses Cookbooks and recipes as part of its configuration, which we will focus on in the next section.