Chef Node Management overview

Chef Node Management enrolls nodes into Chef 360 Platform, makes nodes visible in a node fleet, manages skills (agents) installed on nodes, and groups nodes using filters or lists.

What’s a node?

A node is a resource–either physical or virtual–that’s accessible over a network.

Nodes have a set of basic attributes, but their attributes can be extended to include custom named key/value pairs. Each node is uniquely identified by its node ID. Attributes describe the properties or the current state of a node.

Node Management features

Skills

A skill is an agent that allows you to perform actions on a node for a specific outcome. A skill can either be a canister-based skill or a non-canister-based skill. Skills can be Chef owned (for example, Chef Infra, Chef Inspec, or Chef Courier) or custom that are defined by the user for other use cases and managed with Chef 360.

You must define skills in the Chef 360 Platform Server before adding them to the nodes with a skill assembly. Define settings that the skill needs to function using override settings.

Node enrollment

Node enrollment brings nodes under the management of Chef 360 Platform.

Node attributes

Nodes have attributes that you can use to filter, group, sort, or search with.

Chef 360 Platform reserves several attribute namespaces for integration purposes, but users can also define their own.

Node filtering

A node filter is a search expression used to identify a set of nodes. Node filters allow you to match nodes based on SQL-like expressions on any namespace and attribute. You can create node filters that include or exclude nodes based on specific pattern sets.

Node lists

A node list is a user-created and managed static list of nodes.