Chef Essentials

About This Book

• Learn how to use Chef in a concise manner
• Learn ways to use Chef to integrate with cloud services such as EC2 and Rackspace Cloud
• See advanced ways to integrate Chef into your environment, develop tests, and even extend Chef's core functionality

Who This Book Is For

If you have some understanding of IT infrastructure principles and are ready to find out what Chef is all about, then this guide will show you all you need to know. In order to get the most out of this book, some experience of programming or scripting languages would be useful.

What You Will Learn

• Install the Chef server on your own hosts


• Model your infrastructure using Chef from a small number of hosts to a larger scale


• Integrate Chef with cloud services


• Develop custom recipes to deploy your software using Chef


• Test recipes across multiple platforms


• Extend Chef's built-in functionality to support custom resources


• Manage development environments using chef-solo and Vagrant

In Detail

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.

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.