I am looking at automated deployment solutions for my team and have been playing with Chef for the past few days. I've been able to get a simple web app up an running from a base Red Hat VM using chef-solo.

Our end goal is to use Chef (or another system) to automatically deploy application topologies to the cloud as we run builds. Our process would basically run like so:

1. Our web app code, dependencies, and chef cookbooks are stored in SCM
2. A build is executed and greats a single package for images to acquire and test against
3. The build engine then deploys new cloud images that run a chef client to get packages installed.
4. The images acquire the cookbooks from SCM or the Chef server and install everything to get up and running

What are the benefits and/or use cases for getting a Chef Server running?

Are there any major benefits to have a Chef Server hold and acquire the cookbooks from SCM vs. using chef-solo and having a script that will pull the cookbooks from SCM?