Learning Chef: A Guide to Configuration Management and Automation

Get a hands-on introduction to the Chef, theconfiguration management tool for solving operations issues in enterpriseslarge and small. Ideal for developers and sysadmins new to configurationmanagement, this guide shows you to automate the packaging and delivery ofapplications in your infrastructure. You’ll be able to build (or rebuild) yourinfrastructure’s application stack in minutes or hours, rather than days orweeks.

After teaching you how to write Ruby-basedChef code, this book walks you through different Chef tools and configurationmanagement concepts in each chapter, using detailed examples throughout. Allyou need to get started is command-line experience and familiarity with basicsystem administration.

• Configure your Chef development environment and start writing recipes
• Create Chef cookbooks with recipes for each part of your infrastructure
• Use Test Kitchen to manage sandbox testing environments
• Manage single nodes with Chef client, and multiple nodes with Chef Server
• Use data bags for storing shared global data between nodes
• Simulate production Chef Server environments with Chef Zero
• Classify different types of services in your infrastructure with roles
• Model life stages of your application, including development, testing, staging, and production