Large-scale infrastructure

One of the many benefits of Chef is the power to apply roles to nodes at scale. This means that once you define a set of roles and some supporting recipes, you can apply them to one host just as easily as any other. There are many organizations that manage very large infrastructure using Chef, including companies such as Facebook, Ancestry, and Riot Games. With Chef, configuring one hundred hosts is as straightforward as configuring one host. Being able to achieve scalability goals while remaining cost-effective is a critical part of running a technology business. To this end, Chef provides tools to automate the creation, provisioning, maintenance and termination of virtual hosts using the provided tools, which can help achieve both scalability and conservation of resources. The next chapter discusses how to use Chef to extend your infrastructure into the cloud.