Learning Chef: A Guide to Configuration Management and Automation

Get a hands-on introduction to the Chef, the configuration management tool for solving operations issues in enterprises large and small. Ideal for developers and sysadmins new to configuration management, this guide shows you to automate the packaging and delivery of applications in your infrastructure. You'll be able to build (or rebuild) your infrastructure's application stack in minutes or hours, rather than days or weeks.

After teaching you how to write Ruby-based Chef code, this book walks you through different Chef tools and configuration management concepts in each chapter, using detailed examples throughout. All you need to get started is command-line experience and familiarity with basic system 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

Author: Mischa Taylor,Seth Vargo
Publisher: O'Reilly Media
Published: 12/23/2014
Pages: 363
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.32lbs
Size: 9.22h x 7.04w x 0.79d
ISBN: 9781491944936

About the Author

Mischa Taylor is a consultant at Chef, a fast-growing Seattle-based startup responsible for creating the Chef platform, which makes it easy to quickly automate development processes and move business processes into the cloud. He has spent his career focusing on building high quality products and increasing engineering productivity within organizations. Mischa is an author, speaker and mentor on software development topics and neuromorphic computing.

Seth Vargo is a Developer Advocate at Google. Previously he worked at HashiCorp, Chef Software, CustomInk, and a few Pittsburgh-based startups. He is the author of Learning Chef and is passionate about reducing inequality in technology. When he is not writing, working on open source, teaching, or speaking at conferences, Seth enjoys spending time with his friends and advising non-profits.