Chapter 1, Vagrant Development Environments, is all about automated development environments using Vagrant. Launch simple or complex environments, simulate various virtual networking configurations, combine Vagrant and Docker or the Amazon cloud, and hand over the provisioning of virtual machines to Chef and Ansible. All examples are self-contained real-life little projects.

Chapter 2, Provisioning IaaS with Terraform, is everything needed to get started with Terraform on Amazon Web Services, from managed database servers to log handling, storage, credentials, Docker registries, and EC2 instances.

Chapter 3, Going Further with Terraform, sheds light on some more advanced techniques of using Terraform code, such as dynamic data sources, separate environments, Docker, GitHub or StatusCake integration, team work, and how the code linter works.

Chapter 4, Automating Complete Infrastructures with Terraform, will show and describe complete, real-life Terraform code for infrastructures on Amazon Web Services, Digital Ocean, OpenStack, Heroku, Packet, and Google Cloud. We'll deploy a Docker Swarm cluster on a bare metal CoreOS cluster for containers, an n-tier web infrastructure, or a GitLab + CI combo.

Chapter 5, Provisioning the Last Mile with Cloud-Init, explores everything we can do with cloud-init code—file management, server configuration, adding users and keys, repositories and packages, or examples of extensions such as Chef, CoreOS, and Docker.

Chapter 6, Fundamentals of Managing Servers with Chef and Puppet, shows the essentials of using Chef code to automate an infrastructure. From the workstation setup to writing our own recipes to managing external cookbooks, this chapter contains it all—we'll manage packages, services, files, dynamic templates, dependencies, relationships, shared data, and more, all using code. Alternative ways of doing similar actions using Puppet code are also shown for you to have a better view of the ecosystem.

Chapter 7, Testing and Writing Better Infrastructure Code with Chef and Puppet, is all about advanced techniques of testing code for quality and sustainability. It also covers unit and integration testing, linters, and tools for Chef and Puppet, so that you'll produce the best infrastructure code possible.

Chapter 8, Maintaining Systems Using Chef and Puppet, shows advanced features made possible by Chef or Puppet code, such as scheduled convergence, encrypted secrets, environments, live system information retrieval, application deployments, and workflows or practices to be safe.

Chapter 9, Working with Docker, is about using Docker containers from a developer point of view—choosing a base image, optimizations, tags, versioning, deploying Ruby-on-Rails or Go applications, networking, security, linting, and using our own durable private registry—all using simple Docker instructions—as code.

Chapter 10, Maintaining Docker Containers, is showing more advanced Docker usage for developers and engineers, such as code testing, automated build pipelines and Continuous Integration, automated vulnerability scanning, monitoring, and debugging.

The essential requirement is a computer capable of running a Linux virtual machine and an Internet connection. The author's computers are laptops running Mac OS 10.11 and Fedora 25, with VirtualBox 5, but any other Linux distribution will work as well. Vagrant, Terraform, the Chef Development Kit, and Docker also work on the Windows platform, although this is untested by the authors.

As we're dealing with Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) here, also required are valid accounts with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Digital Ocean, Packet, Heroku, or an OpenStack deployment.

Through the various chapters of this book, we'll also use free Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) accounts such as GitHub, Travis CI, Docker Hub, Quay.io, Hosted Chef, and StatusCake.

This book is for DevOps engineers and developers working in cross-functional teams or operations and would like to switch to IAC to manage complex infrastructures.

In this book, you will find several headings that appear frequently (Getting ready, How to do it…, How it works…, There's more…, and See also).

To give clear instructions on how to complete a recipe, we use these sections as follows:

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, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Include both the NGINX configuration and docker-compose.yml files from the previous recipe and you're good to go."

A block of code is set as follows:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  # all your Vagrant configuration here
end

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

    config.vm.provision "ansible_local" do |ansible|
      ansible.version = "1.9.6"
      ansible.install_mode = :pip
      ansible.playbook = "playbook.yml"
    end

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

$ vagrant plugin list
vagrant-vbguest (0.13.0)

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: "You can see your newly created security group by logging into the AWS Console and navigating to EC2 Dashboard | Network & Security | Security Groups."

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