Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook, Second Edition

• Automate error-prone and tedious manual tasks and manage your servers on-site or in the cloud
• Equip yourself with Chef components such as Chef client and solo, and learn how to create simple Chef cookbooks and various other artifacts for managing systems with Chef when live
• Packed with working code and easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions to configure, deploy, and scale your applications

Who This Book Is For

This book is for system engineers and administrators who have a fundamental understanding of information management systems and infrastructure. It helps if you've already played around with Chef; however, this book covers all the important topics you will need to know. If you don't want to dig through a whole book before you can get started, this book is for you, as it features a set of independent recipes you can try out immediately.

What You Will Learn

• Set up your local development and testing environment for Chef
• Debug your cookbooks and Chef runs by using the numerous inspection and logging facilities of Chef
• Drive your cookbooks from external data or node-specific attributes
• Manage and scale your cloud infrastructure by automating your configuration management
• Extend Chef to meet your advanced needs by creating custom plugins for knife and Ohai
• Test your Chef cookbooks and infrastructure by writing examples

In Detail

Chef is a configuration management tool that lets you automate your more cumbersome IT infrastructure processes and control a large network of computers (and virtual machines) from one master server.

This book takes you through covering the various artifacts of Chef and explains the techniques of building full-fledged real-world solutions. After describing how to use the basic Chef command-line tools such as knife and Berkshelf, the book will show you how to troubleshoot your work. It will also take you through the core concepts of managing users, applications, and your entire cloud infrastructure. This book will help you learn the techniques of the pros by walking you through a host of step-by-step guides to solve real-world infrastructure automation challenges.

About the Author

Matthias Marschall is a software engineer "Made in Germany" and the author of the Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook by Packt Publishing. His four children make sure that he feels comfortable and stays in control of chaotic situations. A lean and Agile engineering lead, he's passionate about continuous delivery, infrastructure automation, and all things DevOps. In recent years, Matthias has helped build several web-based businesses, first with Java and then with Ruby on Rails. He quickly moved into system administration, writing his own configuration management tool before moving his whole infrastructure to Chef in its early days. In 2008, he started a blog with Dan Ackerson. Matthias is the CTO of www.gutefrage.net GmbH that helps run Germany's biggest Q&A site among other high traffic sites. He holds a master's degree in computer science [Dipl.-Inf.(FH)] and teaches courses on Agile software development at the University of Augsburg.