Chef Essentials

by John Ewart

Discover how to deploy software, manage hosts, and scale your infrastructure with ChefAbout This BookLearn how to use Chef in a concise mannerLearn ways to use Chef to integrate with cloud services such as EC2 and Rackspace CloudSee advanced ways to integrate Chef into your environment, develop tests, and even extend Chef's core functionalityWho This Book Is ForIf 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 LearnInstall the Chef server on your own hostsModel your infrastructure using Chef from a small number of hosts to a larger scaleIntegrate Chef with cloud servicesDevelop custom recipes to deploy your software using ChefTest recipes across multiple platformsExtend Chef's built-in functionality to support custom resourcesManage development environments using chef-solo and VagrantIn DetailChef 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.

220 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[Mitesh Soni · Rating 4 out of 5]

Infrastructure automation is an extremely vital expertise nowadays because of rise of Cloud Computing in recent years. Chef, configuration management tool is very popular nowadays and hence I was keen to get my hands on Chef. Lot of material is available on Internet including tutorials and blogs but I found a Book Chef Essentials on Packetpub. To my surprise, the book covers great deal of details in first three chapters itself. Installation, Configuration and Integrating with one of the most popular Public Cloud – Amazon Web Services in first three chapters is a sheer delight. Technical language used to explain the concepts is very easily understandable. With AWS, it provides details on provisioning and terminating instances and various other information as well. Basic concepts have been covered in an exemplary manner considering beginners. It also provides detail coverage of developing custom extensions and User management which is extremely essential.
All and all for beginners, this book is a great way to start and gain insights into Chef and also having full hands on in various Cloud Platforms. It also explains application deployment on EC2 using sample python application. It completes the whole circle from Basic concepts to deployment of an application.

[Riccardo Massera · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must have Book for getting started with Chef

Cloud Computing has grown incredibly in the last years, and having a powerful tool like Chef that automates configuration, provisioning and deployment has become a must.

Chef Essentials is targeted to both beginners and more experienced users and helps you to quickly get started with Chef.

It starts with the basic concepts in the first chapters and then delves into Chef internals explaining its architecture and how you can deal with recipes and how to develop and test your own recipes to achieve your goals.

One thing beginners will particularly appreciate are the examples on how to use Chef with two real and popular cloud providers, namely Amazon EC2 and Rackspace.

But perhaps the most interesting part is the chapter that teaches how to setup your application environment to automate its deployment on a cloud infrastructure like Amazon EC2.

The final part of the book explains some advanced topics like working with data bags and writing custom extensions.

To sum up, this is a nice book to read if you are interested in learning Chef and how to use it in real scenarios to automate your tasks in a cloud environment.

[Patrik Antonsson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve been using Puppet for some years now. This is the first Chef book I read. And I think I got a good overview of what Chef is and how to use it. It gives you a good start and then I guess the best way forward is to explore what other people have done with Chef. I whole chapter is dedicated to testning which is good.

I highly recommend some ruby experience before reading this book. Otherwise some of it will be hard to understand.

Link to the book: http://bit.ly/11dytQJ

[Krapesh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Managing a mid or greater sized IT infrastructure could sometimes become pain for administrators. To make the job manageable and easier, the Chef framework is reliable in getting the job done. In the book, the step-wise procedure from installing, configuring & deploying the chef server has been nicely explained. In addition to that, integrating the framework with the cloud is also explained which enhances the utility of the framework in case of larger deployment scenario. The most interesting part of the chef server is the use of 'recipes' that makes the work of managing the IT infrastructure much more manageable. Features like user management and encrypting data, key management also adds up the security feature of the framework. A really good book for managing IT infrastructure in an efficient and smart way.