Mastering Chef Provisioning

Key Features

• This is the first Chef book focused on provisioning infrastructure as its sole task. The book offers a clear solution to a specific pain point: learn to make your system work faster.
• Learning better approaches to load balancing and parallelization with this book will save you time
• By mastering the techniques in this book, you will know how to run an entire fleet of machines without breaking a sweat
• This book is more helpful than the documentation ( https://docs.chef.io/provisioning.html), with a stronger guiding voice and clearer explanations and use cases

Book Description

This book will show you the best practices to describe your entire infrastructure as code.

With the help of this book you can expand your knowledge of Chef because and implement robust and scalable automation solutions. You can automate and document every aspect of your network, from the hardware to software, middleware, and all your containers. You will become familiar with the Chef’s Chef Provisioning tool. You will be able to make a perfect model system where everything is represented as code beneath your fingertips.

Make the best possible use of your resources, and deliver infrastructure as code, making it as versionable, testable and repeatable as application software

What you will learn

• Use best practices to describe your entire infrastructure as code
• Automate and document every aspect of your network, from the hardware of individual nodes to software, middleware, and all containers and clouds
• Create a perfect model system
• Make the best possible use of your resources and avoid redundancy
• Deliver on the promise of Infrastructure as Code
• Scale with ease by properly provisioning their infrastructure
• Use the best Test Driven Development methodologies

About the Author

Earl Waud is a virtualization development professional with more than 10 years of focused industry experience, creating innovative solutions for hypervisor provisioning, management, and automation. He is an expert in aligning engineering strategy with organizational vision and goals, and delivering highly scalable and user friendly virtualization environments.

With more than 20 years of experience developing customer-facing and corporate IT software solutions, he has a proven track record of delivering high-caliber and on-time technology solutions that significantly impact business results.

Earl lives in San Diego, California. He is blessed with a beautiful wife, Patti, and three amazing daughters, Alexis, Daniella, and Madison.

Currently, Earl is a senior software engineer with Intuit Inc., a company that creates business and financial management solutions that simplify the business of life for small businesses, consumers, and accounting professionals.

Earl can be found online at http://sandiegoearl.com.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Setting Up A Development Environment On Your Workstation
Chapter 2. Knife Tooling And Plugins
Chapter 3. Leveraging Roles, Environments, And Policies
Chapter 4. Custom Resources
Chapter 5. Provisioning In The Traditional Data Center
Chapter 6. Provisioning In The Cloud
Chapter 7. Test-Driven Development
Chapter 8. Using Chef Provisioning