Book Image

Chef Essentials

By : John Ewart
Book Image

Chef Essentials

By: John Ewart

Overview of this book

<p>Chef is a configuration management tool that turns IT infrastructure into code. Chef provides tools to manage systems at scale. With this book, you will learn how to use the same tools that companies such as Facebook, Riot Games, and Ancestry.com use to manage and scale their infrastructure.</p> <p>This book takes you on a comprehensive tour of Chef's functionality, ranging from its core features to advanced development. You will be brought up to speed with what's new in Chef and how to set up your own Chef infrastructure for individuals, or small or large teams. Once you have the core components, you will get to grips with bootstrapping hosts to then develop and apply cookbooks. If you want to fully leverage Chef, this book will show you advanced recipes to help you handle new types of data providers and resources. By the end of this book, you will be confident in how to manage your infrastructure, scale using the cloud, and extend the built-in functionality of Chef itself.</p>
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Chef Essentials
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 2. Modeling Your Infrastructure

Now that you have set up your server or are using the hosted offering, let's discuss how to model your infrastructure with Chef. Chef allows you to do this using building blocks that should be familiar to any system administrator.

This chapter will cover how to model your infrastructure with Chef. This will involve the following:

  • Learning some terminologies and concepts relevant to Chef

  • Analyzing a simple application infrastructure and seeing how it can be modeled with Chef

  • Decomposing our architecture into the various components to be modeled

  • Examining how data is stored and configurations are generated with Chef

  • Bootstrapping and provisioning hosts with cloud providers such as AWS and Rackspace Cloud