Ubuntu Unleashed 2015 Edition: Covering 14.10 and 15.04, Tenth Edition

Chef

Chef is a configuration management tool, also written in Ruby. It uses a services-oriented architecture to help automate tasks. For Chef, you write recipes that describe how you want your server or a specific server software to be configured, such as an HTTP server or database server. The recipes describe each resource, such as services that should be running or packages that should be installed, and the state in which each should be found. It then makes sure that configuration is maintained or updated across all servers being managed.

Chef is open source. However, to really use it, you must pay for a hosted version (called Hosted) or a standalone version (called Private) that you can install inside your corporate firewall with a service ...