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 featureslike 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

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 The Chef Server
Chapter 3 Installing and configuring the Chef Server
Chapter 4 Installing and configuring a Workstation
Chapter 5 Nodes
Chapter 6 Knife
Chapter 7 Cookbooks
Chapter 8 Using Cookbooks
Chapter 9 Develop a Complex Cookbook
Chapter 10 Resource and Providers
Chapter 11 HA
Chapter 12 Cloud Provisioning with Vagrant and Chef
Chapter 13 Troubleshooting