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

Getting to know Chef


As with any other tool or system, there are new concepts and terminologies to be learned. Here are some terms that you may have seen or will see in this chapter:

  • Node: A node is a system that is managed by Chef. These can be servers, desktop systems, routers, and anything else that is capable of running the Chef client and has a supported operating system.

  • Workstation: A workstation is a special node that is used by a system administrator to interact with the Chef server and with nodes. This is where the command-line tools are executed, specifically the knife command-line tool.

  • Bootstrap: This is a process of setting up a node to be used as a Chef client. This involves performing any work required to install the dependencies for Chef as well as Chef itself.

  • Bootstrap Script: There are a number of possible ways to install Chef, Ruby, other core requirements, as well as any additional configuration that is needed for your specific systems. To provide this level of flexibility...