Chef queries

DevOps Chef
1

Hello Chef/Community Team Members

I have some query related with chef-infra components and like to get some feedback/response on it. If you can answer here or at DM or lead me to any contact for fast response would be very helpful.

  1. which components from the chef-infra that is chef-client, chef-workstation, chef-inspec, chef-server and chef-automate is open-source and free for use?
  2. with binaries available at https://downloads.chef.io/ for client, workstation and server can we manage 500 nodes without automate (no dashboard required). And if not how many nodes can be managed using this 3 components
  3. which component require the license for use apart from automate?
  4. what is cost of license (approx)
2
  1. All official binaries require license, you can check Cinc.sh or see us in for a community buold with trademarks removed
3
  1. Yes, the number of nodes is roughly unrelated until 10k nodes where you may need to tweak the chef-server a bit
4
  1. All components, and 4) contact à sales representative, there’s no public pricing anymore
5

Hi thanks alot for the response. in point number 2 i would to understand more. say that, if i simply download the binary and setup the chef environment, hence, with server-client-workstation and no license applied will i be able to manage 500node? as somewhere in past i read that only first 25node is free to be manage in chef-server

6

That limitation was for chef-manage back in a time when client/workstation/server were free for use unlimited

7

ok so with chef-server (without manage), workstation and client without applying the license i can manage 500node then

8

I.e: latest 14 client (14.5.19 I think) , latest 12 server (can’t remember exactly) and latest 0 workstation (0.3.2 IIRC)

9

No, with latest versions (17, 14 and can’t remember) you need a license as soon as you have production nodes (not test/discovery)

10

For a recent version, free of license, see cinc, client is done, workstation has still some wordmark but is usable, server is ongoing but should be released soon

11

are we able to build chef-infra-* from source and use internally (no distribution of created binaries outside of company walls) without a license agreement?

12

Yes and No, from Chef guidance: internal builds are considered as a distribution and must comply with the trademark policy, I.E none of Chef trademarks should display when using them. Again, that’s what we’re doing with Cinc in

13

yep been playing with cinc (thanks for the work), was cautious to not use the cinc-workstation since it was marked as unstable

14

so was hoping to just built and use it until cinc-workstation was available as stable

15

You’ll end up with the exacr reason we didn’t tag it stable, some trademarks still lingering in the output, we (cinc team) don’t think it’s fully trademark compliant. But at a functional level it should be OK (minus the tray icon application)