Difference between Chef infra Server vs Chef Zero vs Chef Solo

Chef Infra Server
The preferred way to run Chef in a large server farm is with each server (“node” in chef parlance) talking to a centrally-managed Chef server. You can use Opscode’s hosted chef server, or you can use an on-premises chef server. See https://manage.opscode.com/ for more details.

The Chef Infra Server acts as a hub for configuration data. The Chef Infra Server stores cookbooks, the policies that are applied to nodes, and metadata that describes each registered node that is being managed by Chef Infra Client. Nodes use Chef Infra Client to ask the Chef Infra Server for configuration details, such as recipes, templates, and file distributions. Chef Infra Client then does as much of the configuration work as possible on the nodes themselves (and not on the Chef Infra Server). This scalable approach distributes the configuration effort throughout the organization.
Reference – https://docs.chef.io/server_overview.html

Chef Zero
Chef Zero is a simple, easy-install, in-memory Chef server that can be useful for Chef Client testing and chef-solo-like tasks that require a full Chef Server. Chef Zero is a simple, easy-install, in-memory Chef server that can be useful for Chef Client testing and chef-solo-like tasks that require a full Chef Server. It IS intended to be simple, Chef 11+ compliant, easy to run and fast to start. It is NOT intended to be secure, scalable, performant or persistent. It does NO input validation, authentication or authorization (it will not throw a 400, 401 or 403). It does not save data, and will start up empty each time you start it. Because Chef Zero runs in memory, it’s super fast and lightweight. This makes it perfect for testing against a “real” Chef Server without mocking the entire Internet.
Reference – https://github.com/chef/chef-zero

Chef Solo
chef-solo is an open source version of the chef-client that allows using cookbooks with nodes without requiring access to a Chef server. chef-solo runs locally and requires that a cookbook (and any of its dependencies) be on the same physical disk as the node.

chef-solo is a command that executes Chef Infra Client in a way that does not require the Chef Infra Server in order to converge cookbooks. chef-solo uses Chef Infra Client’s Chef local mode, and does not support the following functionality present in Chef Infra Client / server configurations:

Reference – https://docs.chef.io/chef_solo.html

• Centralized distribution of cookbooks
• A centralized API that interacts with and integrates infrastructure components
• Authentication or authorization

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