Open source configuration management tools

In this section, we are going to enumerate the world's most famous open source configuration management tools, going through the description of each tool, the major focus, and where it can serve well.

Chef

Chef is a configuration management tool that helps us configure and maintain servers that provide a variety of services. Chef uses something called recipes, made to describe the desired management (configuration, installation, change) for the server's applications and utilities. It is widely used for infrastructure with cloud-computing-based platforms (such as Rackspace, Internap, Amazon, Google, OpenStack, SoftLayer, and Microsoft) because of its capacity to automatically provision and configure new machines on the go. The scalability of Chef allows it to be used for small and large infrastructures on demand.

Chef can be executed as a server or a client. The clients are executed on the servers/machines that we want to manage using our server. And...