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 3. Integrating with the Cloud

Being able to configure new hosts automatically means that if you outgrow your existing resources, you can easily bring up new servers to increase your capacity with very little effort. The Chef command-line tool, knife, provides the ability to provision new hosts with cloud services automatically from the command line if configured correctly. This chapter introduces you to using Chef with two popular cloud platform providers: Amazon EC2 and Rackspace Cloud. Here, you will learn to use knife with both of these providers in order to perform the following:

  • Provision new hosts according to your hardware needs

  • Bootstrap the Chef client and register hosts with the Chef service

  • List your existing capacity

  • Terminate unneeded capacity

You will see that all of this can be done using the command-line tools provided without ever having to log in to the provider's web interface, and all of this within a few minutes of time.