Automation through Chef Opscode: A Hands-on Approach to Chef

Automation through Chef Opscode provides an in-depth understanding of Chef, which is written in Ruby and Erlang for configuration management, cloud infrastructure management, system administration, and network management.

Targeted at administrators, consultants, and architect, the book guides them through the advanced features of the tool which are necessary for infrastructure automation, devops automation, and reporting. The book presumes knowledge of Ruby and Erlang which are used as reference languages for creating recipes and cookbooks and as a refresher on them to help the reader get on speed with the flow of book.

The book provides step by step instructions on installation and configuration of Chef, usage scenarios of Chef, in infrastructure automation by providing common scenarios like virtual machine provisioning, OS configuration for Windows, Linux, and Unix, provisioning and configuration of web servers like Apache along with popular databases like MySQL.

It further elaborates on the creation of recipes, and cookbooks, which help in deployment of servers and applications to any physical, virtual, or cloud location, no matter the size of the infrastructure.

The books covers advanced features like LWRPs and Knife and also contains several illustrative sample cookbooks on MySQL, Apache, and CouchDB deployment using a step by step approach.

What you’ll learn

• Features and resources that power Chef as an optimum automation tool
• Installing and configuring Chef
• Managing your infrastructure using Chef
• How to develop cookbooks and recipes
• Real-time automation to deploy servers and applications to any physical, virtual, or cloud location

Who this book is for

• IT administrators
• OS administrators
• Linux administrators
• Consultants
• Cloud architects
• Cloud computing consultants
• Infrastructure architects
• Automation consultants
• Automation architects

About the Authors

Navin Sabharwal is an innovator, thought leader, author, and consultant in the areas of reporting and Analytics, RDBMS technologies including SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, big data technologies, Hadoop, MongoDB, and SAP HANA. Navin has been using big data technologies in creating products and services in the areas of IT service management, product development, cloud computing, cloud lifecycle management, and social network product development. He has created niche award-winning products and solutions and has filed numerous patents in diverse fields such as IT services, assessment engines, ranking algorithms, capacity planning engines, and knowledge management. Navin holds a Master’s in Information Technology and is a Certified Project Management Professional.

Manak Wadhwa holds a master's degree in information technology from Indian Institute of Information Technology and has been working as DevOps engineer in HCL for the past two years. He has also worked with various data center automation tools such as chef, Puppet, and Ansible.

Manak has also been working on various public cloud platforms which include AWS and Azure.