Architecture

Chef includes several clients with the distribution:

• Chef Solo: is a client application that works entirely from on-disk data, and is a light-weight alternative to a full client-server configuration.
• Chef Client: is the client application that works with a Chef Server to persist data and download cookbooks. Chef Clients can also take advantage of Chef Server's search abilities to dynamically integrate your applications with the rest of your infrastructure.
• Knife: is the command line interface to Chef. Knife is primarily used to interact with the Chef Server API, and it can be used for local Chef Repository maintenance.
• Shef: is the interactive Chef shell. Shef allows you to write, run, and debug recipes interactively and also provides a programmatic interface for viewing and editing data on your Chef Server.

The Chef Server that the Chef Client interacts with is either:

Hosted Chef

• Hosted Chef customers do not need to manage their Chef Server, as that is done for them by Opscode.
• If you are a Hosted Chef Customer and have a question, please contact support@opscode.com.

Private Chef

• Private Chef customers should refer to their separate Private Chef Administration Documention for the Private Chef Server.
• If you are a Private Chef Customer and have a question, please contact support@opscode.com.

Open Source Chef Server

• An Open Source Chef Server is comprised of the following components:
  • Chef Server: services HTTP API requests from the Web UI, nodes, and other clients (see above).
  • Chef Server Web UI: the web-based management console for the Chef Server. It manages your infrastructure by making API calls to Chef Server.
  • CouchDB: the primary data store for a Chef server.
  • RabbitMQ: stores and then forwards data from Chef Server to the Chef Solr Indexer. It acts as a buffer for cases when high write loads temporarily exceed the ability of the Chef Solr Indexer to update the search index.
  • Chef Solr Indexer: flattens and expands data to enhance searchability, then writes the data to Chef Solr.
  • Chef Solr: a thin wrapper around the Apache Solr search engine. Chef Solr allows you to find your way around your infrastructure by querying its metadata.

Introduction to Search and Data Bags

Authentication and Authorization