Chef: Powerful Infrastructure Automation

by John Ewart, Matthias Marschall, Earl Waud

Overview

Learn Chef Provisioning like a boss and discover how to deploy software and manage hosts, along with engaging recipes to automate your cloud and server infrastructure with Chef.

About This Book

• Leverage the power of Chef to transform your infrastructure into code to deploy new features in minutes
• Get step-by-step instructions to configure, deploy, and scale your applications
• Master specific Chef techniques to run an entire fleet of machines without breaking a sweat.

Who This Book Is For

If you are a system administrator, Linux administrator, a cloud developer, or someone who just wants to learn and apply Chef automation to your existing or new infrastructure, then this learning path will show you all you need to know. In order to get the most out of this learning path, some experience of programming or scripting languages would be useful.

What You Will Learn

• Install Chef server on your own hosts
• Integrate Chef with cloud services
• Debug your cookbooks and Chef runs using the numerous inspection and logging facilities of Chef
• Extend Chef to meet your advanced needs by creating custom plugins for Knife and Ohai
• Create a perfect model system
• Use the best test-driven development methodologies

In Detail

Chef is a configuration management tool that turns IT infrastructure into code. Chef provides tools to manage systems at scale. This learning path takes you on a comprehensive tour of Chef's functionality, ranging from its core features to advanced development. You will be brought up to speed with what's new in Chef and how to set up your own Chef infrastructure for individuals, or small or large teams. You will learn to use the basic Chef command-line tools. We will also take you through the core concepts of managing users, applications, and your entire cloud infrastructure. You will learn the techniques of the pros by walking you through a host of step-by-step guides to solve real-world infrastructure automation challenges.You will learn to automate and document every aspect of your network, from the hardware to software, middleware, and all your containers. You will become familiar with the Chef'sProvisioning tool. By the end of this course, you will be confident in how to manage your infrastructure, scale using the cloud, and extend the built-in functionality of Chef itself.The books used in this Learning Path are:

1) Chef Essentials

2) Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook – Second Edition

3) Mastering Chef Provisioning

Style and approach

This fast-paced guide covers the many facets of Chef and will teach administrators to use Chef as a birds-eye lens for their entire system. This book takes you through a host of step-by-step guides to solve real-world infrastructure automation challenges and offers elegant, time-saving solutions for a perfectly described and automated network.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781788399388
Publisher:	Packt Publishing
Publication date:	05/16/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	726
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

John has been a consultant, system administrator, university lecturer, and software engineer over the course of the past fifteen years; currently he is working at Chef to make Chef even more awesome than it already is. He has experience developing software for organizations ranging from small start-ups and government entities to Fortune 500s. He has previously authored two other books on managing systems using Chef.
Matthias is a software engineer "Made in Germany" and the author of the Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook by Packt Publishing. His four children make sure that he feels comfortable in lively environments, and stays in control of chaotic situations. A lean and agile engineering lead, he's passionate about continuous delivery, infrastructure automation, and all things DevOps. In recent years, Matthias has helped build several web-based businesses, first with Java and then with Ruby on Rails. He quickly grew into system administration, writing his own configuration management tool before moving his whole infrastructure to Chef in its early days. In 2008, he started a blog (http://www.agileweboperations.com) together with Dan Ackerson. There they shared their ideas about DevOps since the early days of the continually emerging movement. You can find him on Twitter as @mmarschall
Earl is a virtualization development professional with more than 10 years of focused industry experience, creating innovative solutions for hypervisor provisioning, management, and automation. He is an expert in aligning engineering strategy with organizational vision and goals, and delivering highly scalable and user friendly virtualization environments. With more than 20 years of experience developing customer-facing and corporate IT software solutions, he has a proven track record of delivering high-calibre and on-time technology solutions that significantly impact business results. Earl lives in San Diego, California. He is blessed with a beautiful wife, Patti, and three amazing daughters, Alexis, Daniella, and Madison. Currently, Earl is a senior software engineer with Intuit Inc., a company that creates business and financial management solutions that simplify the business of life for small businesses, consumers, and accounting professionals. Earl can be found online at http://sandiegoearl.com.