Using Chef with Microsoft Azure

This book is your hands-on guide to infrastructure provisioning and configuration management in the cloud using Chef’s open source, cross-platform toolset. With over 10,000 customers joining the Microsoft Azure cloud platform each week and steadily increasing usage, the need for automation approaches has never been greater. This book provides both practical examples and a much needed strategic overview of how these two technologies can be combined.

Using Chef with Microsoft Azure takes you through the process of writing ‘recipes’ in Chef to describe your infrastructure as code, and simplify your configuration management processes. You’ll also meet the Chef tools that can be used to provision complete environments within Microsoft Azure.

There are now a wide variety of tools and approaches that can be taken to provision resources such as virtual machines within Microsoft Azure. This book demonstrates them, discusses the benefits and weaknesses of each approach, and shows how a continuous provisioning pipeline can be established as part of a reliable, repeatable, and robust provisioning process.

Each chapter has practical exercises that highlight the capabilities of both Chef and Microsoft Azure from an automation perspective and can be executed on Windows, Mac, or Linux platforms.

In this book, you’ll learn:

• The purpose and principles behind automated provisioning
• Microsoft Azure concepts and management options
• How to deploy Chef Azure Virtual Machine Extensions using PowerShell, Azure command-line tools, and Chef Provisioning
• Chef Provisioning techniques, including provisioning PaaS resources such as KeyVault
• How to integrate quality tooling into the Chef development lifecycle, including Test Kitchen and InSpec with Azure compute resources
• How to set up a pipeline for continuous provisioning with Chef and Azure

Who This Book Is For

This book is for infrastructure platform and operations engineers and DevOps specialists/practitioners working with infrastructure and platform provisioning on Microsoft's public cloud, Azure.

An understanding of programming in any language would be beneficial, but not necessary as the examples are designed to be easily readable by anyone with general IT experience.

While it is expected most users picking up this book will be on the Windows platform, a good proportion of compute workload on the Azure platform is Linux based. As a result the book includes examples that are relevant to both Windows and Linux platforms.

About the Author

Stuart Preston is the Technical Director and co-founder of Pendrica, a technology consultancy based in the United Kingdom focusing on cloud automation with the Microsoft Azure platform. Stuart started his career as a trainee at University College London (UCL) in 1997 and quickly moved into consultancy. Over the last two decades he has specialized in delivering Infrastructure, Platform Architecture and Application Lifecycle Management consultancy on Microsoft.NET and Java-based retail and commerce platforms, motivated by big technical challenges and detailed problem solving that spans the business and technical domains. Prior to starting Pendrica, Stuart was the Chief Technical Officer at RippleRock and EMC Consulting. He resides in London, United Kingdom.