Chapter 1, Chef and Windows, serves as an introduction to Chef's support for Windows, what sort of features you can expect from Chef on the Windows platform, and how to get started.

Chapter 2, Installing the Client – an Overview of Chef Concepts, provides coverage of how to install the client on a Windows host as well as a quick overview of Chef's architecture and terminology and other important information to get you started with managing Windows.

Chapter 3, Windows-specific Resources, introduces you to the resources that are unique to managing Windows via Chef. This chapter provides descriptions and examples of each resource, including roles, features, package installers, batch scripts, the Windows registry, and many more.

Chapter 4, Provisioning an Application Stack, provides a hands-on guide to provisioning a complete application stack (the .NET framework, IIS configuration, database server installation, and so on), including defining roles, setting up configuration data, installing requirements, and configuring the application.

Chapter 5, Managing Cloud Services with Chef, covers integrating with various cloud providers such as AWS, Rackspace Cloud, and Azure.

Chapter 6, Going Beyond the Basics, focuses on the integration of existing systems in heterogeneous networks, how to deal with recipes and multiple platforms, testing, organization, and publishing of recipes.

This book expects that you have access to some important components in order to be successful. In order to execute the examples in the book, the following prerequisites are needed:

Additionally, if you wish to try out any of the cloud-computing examples, you will need an account with the cloud hosting providers you are trying out.

This book is designed for system administrators who have had some exposure to Chef, either casually or in-depth. It covers the Windows-specific facets of Chef and expects that you have a working installation of the Chef server available for you to use, either hosted or self-managed. A working knowledge of some programming language, preferably Ruby, will be needed to get the most out of the examples and to build your own recipes.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, cookbook names, recipe names, scripts, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, and pathnames are shown as follows: "In the same way that you would leverage knife ssh for Linux systems, knife winrm is available to execute commands remotely on a Windows host using the WinRM protocol."

A block of code is set as follows:

search(:node, 'role:web_server).each do |node|
  ip = node[:external_ip]
  firewall_rule "#{ip}" do
    source "#{ip}"
    action :allow
  end
end

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

knife ssh "role:mysql" "chef-client"  --sudo –x ubuntu

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "If you check the Chef Client Service box during the installation phase, the service will be set to run automatically."

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