Using Chef Server, you can automate servers configuration management, dynamically change formation between servers, execute some task to a group of servers at once. It is very useful to automate huge system, but it is also good for managing each system of multiple small systems sharing Coobooks.

The Chef server acts as a hub for configuration data. The server stores cookbooks, the policies that are applied to nodes, and metadata that describes each registered node that is being managed by the chef-client. Nodes use the chef-client to ask the server for configuration details, such as recipes, templates, and file distributions. The chef-client then does as much of the configuration work as possible on the nodes themselves (and not on the server). This scalable approach distributes the configuration effort throughout the organization.