Today, the DevOps Engineer is responsible for delivering infrastructure that is rock solid and consistently configured every time. What's more, these superheroes need to supply the infrastructure rapidly and at scale, often to the tune of dozens or even hundreds of identically configured systems.
The days of doing this superhero work manually are long gone. Now the only question is "which superpower will best serve our heroes in their time of greatest need?" The answer is the power that can transform their infrastructure into code so that it can be managed the same way as any other source code-based project. Chef is that superpower.
And Mastering Chef Provisioning is your secret decoder ring for learning how to use that power to provision containers, servers, and networking devices across the universe of hosting targets, including your local workstation, the traditional data center, and in the clouds.
In this book, you will learn the secrets of how to automate and document every aspect of your infrastructure. You will find the best practices for describing your infrastructure as code. You will learn to automate the provisioning of everything from the smallest container deployed to your local workstation to the biggest distributed application clusters deployed to the cloud, all in a single bound.
This book will help you, the DevOps superhero, to create a perfect model system where everything is represented as code beneath your fingertips. You will be able to make the best possible use of your resources, avoid redundancy, and always be ready to scale—faster than a speeding bullet. And you don't have to leave your home planet, get bitten by a radioactive spider, or fall in a vat of toxic waste to do it.
But as the great Stan Lee wrote, "With great power …".
Chapter 1, Setting Up a Development Environment on Your Workstation, reviews Chef basics and covers the installation of our Chef workstation and an on-premise Chef Server.
Chapter 2, Knife Tooling and Plugins, shows how to get all the help you need with knife, explores using both common and uncommon knife subcommands, and teaches you how to create your own custom knife plugins.
Chapter 3, Leveraging Roles, Environments, and Policies, examines Chef roles, environments, and organizations, covers the attribute precedence hierarchy, and investigates the exciting new Chef policy feature.
Chapter 4, Custom Resources, introduces the custom resource, explores how the custom resource has improved upon LWRPs and HWRPs, and shows how to create and use your own custom resources.
Chapter 5, Provisioning in the Traditional Data Center, presents provisioning in the traditional data center, covering provisioning to VMware vSphere, OpenStack, VMware's desktop hypervisors, and common network devices, and teaches how to deploy your own development OpenStack environment.
Chapter 6, Provisioning in the Cloud, presents provisioning in the cloud, covering provisioning to Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Platform, and Linode, and shows how to provision containers in Docker.
Chapter 7, Test-Driven Development, teaches how to use several of the tools available to implement a test-driven development cycle for infrastructure code development, including RuboCop, Foodcritic, ChefSpec, and Test Kitchen.
Chapter 8, Using Chef Provisioning, reveals how to use the ChefDK feature known as Chef provisioning, providing examples for Vagrant, AWS, and Docker.
The examples in this book were written with the ChefDK version 0.12.0. Examples were tested primarily on Mac OS X and Ubuntu workstations, although all examples should work equally well on other flavors of Linux as well as on Microsoft Windows.
This book is for software engineers, system administrators, and DevOps Engineers who need to quickly deliver reliably consistent infrastructure at scale. You are expected to have intermediate experience with Chef and Ruby and will be reading this book to advance your knowledge and take your skillset to the next level.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, and user input are shown as follows: "What this error message is probably indicating is that there is no valid host entry in the /etc/hosts file."
A block of code is set as follows:
# add a rule for ssh neutron security-group-rule-create $ID \ --direction ingress --ethertype IPv4 \ --protocol tcp --port-range-min 22 --port-range-max 22 \ --remote-ip-prefix 0.0.0.0/0
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
# add a rule for ssh
neutron security-group-rule-create $ID \
--direction ingress --ethertype IPv4 \
--protocol tcp --port-range-min 22 --port-range-max 22 \
--remote-ip-prefix 0.0.0.0/0Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
$ sudo knife openstack image list Name ID Snapshot cirros-0.3.4-x86_64-uec 84dff654-7f0d-45c8-a20b-b08c0ef39fd1 no
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Click on the Continue button to advance the installation."
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