Chef Cookbook - Third Edition

Master over 80 incredibly effective recipes to manage the day-to-day complications in your infrastructure

About This Book

• Immediately apply Devops techniques and methods, then combine them with powerful Chef tools to manage and automate your infrastructure
• Address the growing challenges of code management, cloud, and virtualization with Chef quickly
• Explore and implement the important aspects of Chef Automate using this recipe-based guide

Who This Book Is For

This book is for system engineers and administrators who have a fundamental understanding of information management systems and infrastructure. It is also for DevOps Engineers, IT professionals, and organizations who want to automate and gain greater control of their infrastructures with Chef. No experience with Chef is needed, but may help.

What You Will Learn

• Test your cookbooks with Test Kitchen
• Manage cookbook dependencies with Berkshelf
• Use reporting to keep track of what happens during the execution of chef-client runs across all of the machines
• Create custom Ohai and Knife plugins
• Build a high-availability service using Heartbeat
• Use a HAProxy to load-balance multiple web servers

In Detail

Chef is a configuration management tool that lets you automate your more cumbersome IT infrastructure processes and control a large network of computers (and virtual machines) from one master server.

This book will help you solve everyday problems with your IT infrastructure with Chef. It will start with recipes that show you how to effectively manage your infrastructure and solve problems with users, applications, and automation. You will then come across a new testing framework, InSpec, to test any node in your infrastructure.

Further on, you will learn to customize plugins and write cross-platform cookbooks depending on the platform. You will also install packages from a third-party repository and learn how to manage users and applications. Toward the end, you will build high-availability services and explore what Habitat is and how you can implement it.

Style and approach

This book follows a recipe-based approach and covers all the important topics you need to know. If you don't want to dig through a whole book before you get started, this book is for you, as it features a set of independent recipes you can try out immediately.