Book Image

Mastering Chef Provisioning

By : Earl Waud
Book Image

Mastering Chef Provisioning

By: Earl Waud

Overview of this book

This book will show you the best practices to describe your entire infrastructure as code. With the help of this book you can expand your knowledge of Chef because and implement robust and scalable automation solutions. You can 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’s Chef Provisioning tool. You will be able to make a perfect model system where everything is represented as code beneath your fingertips. Make the best possible use of your resources, and deliver infrastructure as code, making it as versionable, testable and repeatable as application software

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Mastering Chef Provisioning
Earl Waud
Jun, 2016 | 262 pages
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Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Mastering Chef Provisioning
Mastering Chef Provisioning
Credits
Credits
Foreword
Foreword
About the Author
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Setting Up a Development Environment on Your Workstation
Setting Up a Development Environment on Your Workstation
Re-introducing Chef
Filling in the gaps in your Chef knowledge base
Exploring the Chef Development Kit
Installing Chef Development Kit
Setting up a standard Chef repo
What else do you need?
What is chef-apply?
Summary
2
Knife Tooling and Plugins
Knife Tooling and Plugins
Knife help
Knife subcommands
Knife to editor integration
Knife Windows plugin
Knife EC2 plugin
Creating new Knife plugins
Summary
3
Leveraging Roles, Environments, and Policies
Leveraging Roles, Environments, and Policies
Using Chef roles
Using Chef environments
Using Chef organizations
Learning the attribute precedence hierarchy
Exploring policies
Summary
4
Custom Resources
Custom Resources
Out with the old (LWRPs), in with the new (Custom Resources)
Creating an example use case
Creating and using a Custom Resource
Making a Custom Resource more reusable
Subclassing a Custom Resource
Summary
5
Provisioning in the Traditional Data Center
Provisioning in the Traditional Data Center
VMware provisioning
OpenStack provisioning
Network automation
Summary
6
Provisioning in the Cloud
Provisioning in the Cloud
Provisioning AWS EC2 instances
Provisioning Microsoft Azure instances
Provisioning in the Google Cloud platform
Looking at an honorable mention – Linode
Provisioning containers in Docker
Summary
7
Test-Driven Development
Test-Driven Development
Analyzing cookbooks with RuboCop
Analyzing cookbooks with Foodcritic
Unit testing with ChefSpec
Integration testing with Kitchen and ServerSpec
Summary
8
Using Chef Provisioning
Using Chef Provisioning
What is Chef provisioning?
How to use Chef Provisioning
Summary
Index
Index

Out with the old (LWRPs), in with the new (Custom Resources)

When Chef was created, the Chef developers delivered a tool that had a lot of capabilities right out of the box. The variety of resources that it supported natively was very useful and quite extensive. But, of course, being a finite tool, it could not handle every possible type of resource that existed or could exist in the future. Knowing this, the Chef developers built in a feature set to allow users to augment the capabilities and support an ever-growing set of resources.

This feature set is known as Lightweight Resource Providers (LWRP) and Heavyweight Resource Providers (HWRP). These features allow users to define new resources and create the providers to support those resources, making Chef infinitely customizable.

The two types, LWRP and HWRP, are differentiated by the level of complexity used to define the resources and the providers being created. LWRPs are created using the Chef DSL (Domain-specific Language) and are...

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