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

Vagrant and Chef-solo


Vagrant is a very useful tool to build development environments, where it provides tools to build virtual machines that contain everything you need to get started with building software. Consider, for a moment, working on a team that builds software and relies on a service-oriented architecture (SOA), and this software is composed of a number of different services. In order for it to work, you may be required to install and configure all of the dependent services to even begin working on a part of the system; this could be a time-consuming and error-prone exercise for even seasoned developers. Now imagine that all you had to do was download a configuration file and execute vagrant to do it for you—this is the world of Vagrant.

One of the interesting facets of Vagrant is that it has support to provision new instances using a number of different mechanisms. Currently, this list includes 10 or so different tools, but the most interesting two are Chef-solo and Chef client...