Rolling out new servers is a big part of system administrators’ jobs, so any software that can simplify server installation and configuration is a welcome tool. We sat down with OpenLogic’s Senior Content Manager Brad Reeves to talk about Chef, an open source systems integration framework built to bring the benefits of server configuration management to an entire operating infrastructure.
What is Chef?
Chef is a programming method to keep multiple systems in sync. One of the big problems we have in computer science and engineering in general is that if I deploy code to five servers, and then work on those five servers independently, they gradually drift further and further out of sync. So Chef, in a nutshell, is a system that allows you to control the content on multiple servers in one place and keep them in sync. OpenLogic looked at Chef for our internal use, and then we looked at it even further to drive some of our cloud offering as well, because when we’re spinning up these new instances in the cloud, we want them to be in a ‘known state’ – and so we use Chef to get them into that known state.
