a Ruby based provisioning and configuration management tool
From the Opscode web site:
Chef is a systems and cloud infrastructure automation framework that makes it easy to deploy servers and applications to any physical, virtual, or cloud location, no matter the size of the infrastructure. Each Chef organization is comprised of one (or more) workstations, a single server, and every node that will be configured and maintained by Chef. Cookbooks (and recipes) are used to tell Chef how each node in your organization should be configured. The chef-client (which is installed on every node) does the actual configuration.
