Chef
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
Chef is an older infrastructure automation tool where you write 'recipes' and 'cookbooks' to describe how servers should be configured. The food metaphor runs deep — recipes are scripts, cookbooks are collections of recipes, and a Chef server keeps track of all your kitchen's state.
Real Talk
Chef is a configuration management tool that uses Ruby-based DSL to define infrastructure configuration as 'recipes' organized into 'cookbooks.' It uses a client-server model where Chef agents on servers pull configuration from a central Chef server. It's largely been superseded by Ansible and Terraform in modern stacks.
When You'll Hear This
"That legacy infra still uses Chef cookbooks — don't touch them." / "We're migrating from Chef to Ansible for better readability."
Related Terms
Ansible
Ansible is a tool that lets you automate the setup of servers by writing scripts called playbooks.
IaC (Infrastructure as Code)
IaC is shorthand for Infrastructure as Code — the idea that your servers and cloud setup should be written in files, not clicked together in a UI.
Infrastructure as Code
ClickOps means building your cloud infrastructure by clicking buttons in AWS console.
Puppet
Puppet is an old-school infrastructure automation tool that describes the desired state of your servers in a language called Puppet DSL.