The popularity of infrastructure management has increased over the past few years. There is no need to manually configure or deploy servers anymore. For server changes, it is perfectly acceptable to use SSH in a specific ‘for’ loop. Automation is the new era. Chef DevOps is a configuration management tool currently used by many companies.
Infrastructure automation is a central location for managing all systems, networks, and devices. This management execution can be done regardless of whether it is in the cloud or on-premises. This will ensure reliability and allow you to deploy applications or infrastructure quicker than expected.
Follow this article to learn how Chef DevOps can automate your infrastructure. To gain more insight, read it in detail.
Chef DevOps is used to automate infrastructure management
Before you can proceed to automate your infrastructure with Chef DevOps you need to understand the basics. You will need an automation platform and configuration platform such as Chef DevOps to treat your infrastructure as code.
It contains pre-written codes that can be used to define the infrastructure, system dependencies and security policies. Chef DevOps provides a central platform to manage all aspects of automated infrastructure.
Chef will detect configuration drift automatically and help you manage your system. You need to ensure security and quickly add Virtual Machines, containers, or cloud instances.
Chef DevOps gives you visibility, repeatability, consistency, and control over the systems. It allows you to put your mind on bringing in new projects and reducing the focus on common infrastructure operation and management. Chef’s Automation Tools can be found on the Chef official website.
The Chef components play an important role in the configuration of the infrastructure. It is impossible to list all of the components, so let us focus on the most important. These are the components:
Chef-repo- The chef-repo is the repository structure in which the cookbooks are created, tested and maintained. This component is set up within the workstation and must be synchronized with various version control systems. It should then be managed as source code.
Cookbooks- Cookbooks are essential units for policy distribution and configuration. A cookbook’s role is to create a scenario in which everything is available for the automation framework. It contains recipes that specify the resources available and the order they should be used. It also contains file distributions, templates and attribute values.
Recipe- It is a fundamental element that supports the organization’s foundation. It is also known as a Chef file, which groups all related resources. It can be used to group all resources necessary for the configuration of a web server, load balancer, or database server. They are executed in the order specified on the run-list.
The Architecture of Chef DevOps
These three components are the core of Chef DevOps’ architecture. These three components will explain the functionality and communication among all devices within Chef infrastructure. These three elements are crucial to Chef architecture. Here’s a quick explanation:
Workstations

Master Devices are the locations where changes are made, updated, or records are kept. The Chef Server receives the information from the designated workstations. These recipes are then created on the selected workstations to implement policies on the worker nodes. The workstations may also use a command line tool called ‘Knife’ which allows for simplified communication between master devices, and the Chef server.
Chef Server

Chef Server is the central node and workstation. Here are all the recipes, metadata, as well as cookbooks. With the help of a Knife, the workbook sends a cookbook to the Chef server. The command-line tool allows the nodes to communicate with the Chef server by using this command-line tool. If infrastructure is modified in any way

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