Book Image

Configuration Management with Chef-Solo

By : Rahman
Book Image

Configuration Management with Chef-Solo

By: Rahman

Overview of this book

This is a step-by-step guide, full of hands-on examples of real-world deployment tasks. Each topic is explained and placed in context, while also pointing out the key details of the concepts used. This book is aimed at system administrators and system engineers who have an understanding of configuration management tools and infrastructure. For novice administrators, it contains easy-to-use application recipes to get started immediately.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Chef server


Chef server facilitates with a quicker way to deploy a complete environment instead of any single machine. We have already discussed that with Chef-Solo, we can configure any single machine. As our infrastructure grows, it becomes difficult to handle operations. Configuration management tools are designed to manage a large infrastructure with several machines.

Chef server is a hub of configurations, cookbooks, node information, and policies. Metadata describes each registered node that is managed by chef-client. Nodes ask chef-client for configuration details from the Chef server. Recipes, templates, and file distributions are saved on the central Chef server. Moreover, Chef server provides an API to send and receive configuration details on the fly.

There are mainly four components of Chef server shown in the following diagram:

Bookshelf

Bookshelf is used to store cookbooks and resolve the cookbook's dependencies. If any cookbook or a file is declared twice, Bookshelf keeps track...