Chef and Azure To Build Compliant Infrastructure

Chef is an open source platform which automates the management of infrastructure. Chef recipes need tested linting, static analysis, unit testing and integration testing also. Chef Automate also includes tools for local development and can integrate with a variety of third-party products for developer workflows.

With the Chef server and client, you describe your infrastructure as code, which means it’s versionable, human-readable, and testable. You can take advantage of cookbooks provided by the Chef community, which contain code for managing your infrastructure. These cookbooks are packages for chef policies (called recipes) and other related metadata, resources, or libraries and they can have dependencies on other cookbooks and call recipes inside those dependencies.

We can integrate Chef with VSTS and there are VSTS extensions in the marketplace already. You build infrastructure, not applications, with chef and Chef does not supports Performance and Optimization tests.

You can use the chef to automate services in Azure resource manager other than virtual machine, though there is some limited coverage there. It allows you to automate hyper-v management through Chef. it'll work anywhere you have an operating system.

We can use Chef for Windows OS Cluster or I would say SQL DB Cluster on top of Windows Server 2K12/2K16. Chef Supports HIPPA and you'd need to build the policies to make your infrastructure compliant. Chef has integrations with OMS, but is not a monitoring tool itself.

Chef is similar as PowerShell or visual studio?

Chef is more similar to PowerShell DSC than straight PowerShell. But Chef can also use all of DSC, so you get the best of both. Chef is made over Ruby scripting language. We can run PowerShell script in Chef. We can have Chef on Java applets and can use Chef to manage python and python apps.

How is Chef different from docker files?

Docker is containerization (packaging and run time). Chef manages server configuration, especially over time because Chef is not only configuration management for infrastructure provisioning but also can do devops activities like automated application deployment.

What could be trade-off between chef and PowerShell?

Chef can use all of PowerShell, so it's the best of both worlds.

How different is Chef from an ARM template?

ARM describes environments (for the most part). Chef recipes define individual server configurations.

PowerShell code or Chef Code, which one is best for IT infrastructure Client OS automation? ‎

Chef works with PowerShell and can use it, so it offers the best of both worlds.

Is Chef an Cloud platform to deploy C# apps?
Chef is a automation platform and can be used to deploy c# apps. You build infrastructure, not applications, with chef.
Compared to Terraform, how is chef different? 
Terraform is about creating environments and is closer to ARM than Chef. Terraform can, as part of its process, install and run chef on the machines it creates.
How can we use chef for Healthcare application development?
You can use it to manage infrastructure running healthcare applications, but it is not an application development language.
How CHEF is useful for System administrators who are working on cloud?
By maintaining consistent environments, unplanned work for systems admins is reduced, allowing you to be more productive
How is Chef different from swift?

Swift is a programming language whereas Chef is a infrastructure automation tool. 
Conclusion

Chef is an Infrastructure management tool which provides a pipeline for the continuous deployment of infrastructure and applications. The Chef VM Extension for Azure allows you to bootstrap your nodes automatically, when the machine is provisioned rather than afterwards, no matter how many machines you manage. There is a VM extension for chef which can be defined in an ARM json file.

References- https://www.chef.io/implementations/azure/