Usually CMS such as SaltStack, Puppet or Ansible consist of server and clients, but in case of Chef we’re have node type such as workstation. Infrastructure looks like this one:

workstation <==> server <==> clients

Workstation – the place where Cookbook are create. Communicate with Chef Server and nodes. workstation stores its private key in the chef-repo

Knife – utility for upload data to Chef server from chef repo directory.

Chef-repo contains: Cookbooks (including recipes, attributes, custom resources, libraries, and templates), Roles, Data bags, Environments

Role – webserver, db, balancer …

Environments – test, stage, prod.

Ohai – client’s module which scan node properties such as hardware and OS parameters and save it to attributes.

run-list – list of recepies

berkshelf – cookbook dependency manager

attributes – detail about node

recipes – installation scripts

resource – desirable state of configuration object

cookbook – a bunch of recipes

bootstrap – client installation on the node