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

Automation and integration


One of the best parts about Chef is that your infrastructure and software model is consistent with what is deployed. What this means for you is that when chef-client runs on an endhost, that host's state is updated to match your modeled environment. For example, consider a scenario where you have 10 EC2 database hosts, and all of them have a special role, database_server, applied to them. This role's attributes indicate that PostgreSQL 9.1 is to be installed and its data should be stored in /opt/postgresql/data. By executing chef-client on all ten nodes, they will have PostgreSQL 9.1 installed and storing data in /opt/postgresql/data. Now consider that all of our nodes need to have a new EBS storage device attached to each of them, and PostgreSQL needs to be pointed to our new EBS device. Updating our model to include a recipe that mounts the EBS device gracefully shuts down PostgreSQL, moves the database data, reconfigures PostgreSQL, and starts it up again. We...