(design_proposal): chef cli catalog

Signed-off-by: Salim Afiune <afiune@chef.io>

docs/Chef-CLI-Catalog.md

@@ -0,0 +1,91 @@
+# Chef CLI (Catalog)
+
+Throughout the history of Chef, we have created and acquired a variety
+of tools that have grown to a point that, as a Chef practitioner, it is
+hard to know, discover and understand all of them. A few of the tools
+that our users use (almost) every day are:
+
+* chef (CLI that includes PolicyFiles)
+* hab (Habitat CLI)
+* inspec
+* ohai
+* kitchen (Test-kitchen)
+* knife
+* berks (Berkshelf)
+* cookstyle
+* delivery
+* chef-apply
+* chef-client
+* chef-run
+* chef-shell
+* chef-solo
+
+## Goals
+* Have a single, unified way to discover tools to interact with Chef products
+* Huge speed improvements
+* Gather data about how our users consume and interact with our tools (Telemetry)
+* Standardize the UX of our (CLI) tools
+* Have the flexibility to rename tools and commands within our ecosystem
+* Enable developers to use any supported programming languages at Chef for efficiency
+
+## Motivation
+
+    As a Chef practitioner,
+    I would like to have a single Command Line Interpreter (CLI) that lets me easily interact with every Chef product.
+    I would also like to have a way to discover new tools that can help me with my day to day work.
+    Finally, since I run these tools daily, I need them to run fast
+
+    As a Chef developer,
+    I would have a tremendous benefit from this architecture since
+    I would be able to gather information about how our users consume and interact with our tools,
+    as well as identifying the commands that are used the most,
+    so I can improve the speed and/or do extreme modifications to the code base (do a rewrite in a different, more efficient, programing language)
+
+## Specification
+
+Currently, inside the latest version of Chef Workstation (0.14.16 as of 01/20/2020),
+the team has implemented a top-level chef command that acts as a wrapper around our
+variety of tools. The main idea about this command is to have the ability to create
+a catalog of tools/sub-commands, it will act as a proxy between the user and our
+tools.
+
+Quick diagram that illustrates the new Chef CLI Catalog:
+
+![chef-cli-catalog](img/chef-top-level-command.jpg)
+
+With this architecture, we are now able to integrate and modularize multiple tools
+in a single place and make the chef command a first citizen of our development
+experience. We will also be able to gather immediate information from our users of
+all our tools so we can understand what parts of our tooling are the most used and
+which areas can we improve.
+
+Once detecting such areas of improvement, we can have the flexibility to improve
+tools entirely or sub-sections of the tool. Say for instance, that our users run
+`knife node list` around 20-30 times a day, if the command takes around 10-15
+seconds to run, we are consuming 5 minutes from our users only on waiting time.
+With this approach we could rewrite that specific command to run 10x faster and
+give that time back to our users.
+
+![mocked-chef-help-command](img/mocked-chef-help-command.png)
+
+[Gist with a few mocked help commands.](https://gist.github.com/afiune/1dc854089002e182288a0452eaa91908)
+
+## Downstream Impact
+TBA
+
+## Milestones
+### Implement Telemetry into the top-level chef command
+We need to start gathering information about how our users use the chef CLI,
+this will allow us to understand the impact that we will have from the
+aggressivemoves we are about to do.
+
+### Refactor the Chef-CLI
+Restructure the chef-cli binary to have a better sub-command distribution,
+things that are global to the CLI tool like, chef generate or chef shell-init,
+should stay in the binary but we should extract the Policyfile logic out into
+its own binary.
+
+### Link tools and binaries to the top-level chef command
+Make the top-level chef command to understand all our tools and binaries, that
+is, to be able to route sub-commands like chef hab to the hab CLI, and chef
+inspec to the inspec CLI.