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

Summary


Chef has lots of mechanisms to build advanced automation, including building your own definitions, resources, and providers, as well as storing and accessing complex configuration data and even securely encrypting it. This chapter has shown you how to manage data in data bags (including encrypted data), use Chef's advanced search engine to find and manipulate data in your system from the command line and in recipes, as well as develop definitions for reusable recipe development, and even build custom resources and providers for use in your cookbooks.

In the next chapter, we will cover some more advanced ways to use Chef, including interacting with the Chef shell, automation and integration with Chef using scripts and APIs, external tools and resources, advanced testing including integration testing, and using Chef-solo and Vagrant to manage your development environments.