Chef Fundamentals: A Recipe for Automating Infrastructure

Chef Fundamentals: A Recipe for Automating Infrastructure

by Venture Belafonte
Released March 2019
Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
ISBN: 9781838824839

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Video description

Are you the only Chef in the kitchen? Is your infrastructure suffering from snowflake servers? Are you sick and tired of provisioning machines by hand every time you need to put out a fire? Configuring infrastructure shouldn’t be painful, it should be a joy. Chef Fundamentals has been reviewed and approved by the Chef Training team. The Chef team looks forward to the development of additional Chef Courses. Chef is a platform for the DevOps workflow, and is used to automate and manage it all--infrastructure, run-time environments and applications. The most enduring and transformative companies use Chef to become fast, efficient, and innovative software-driven organizations. Join Robin Beck as he automates everything in the only Chef-Certified class. Learn to combine resources into recipes, recipes into cookbooks, and transform your infrastructure into code. With Chef we’ll learn to use the power of the Ruby language to eloquently describe the state of a system, whether you’re new to automation or have been administering systems since 1992. We’ll learn how to locally configure a server with the Chef Development Kit, then use the power of a Chef Server to distribute your cookbook to one, or a hundred systems.

What You Will Learn

  • Describe how Configuration Management with Chef is performed.
  • Be technically savvy in the process of installing and configuring servers in the cloud or in an on-premise datacentre.
  • Gain an understanding of Chef s core components, architecture, and terminology and have basic fluency with the most commonly used tools.
  • Be able to utilize and describe Chef terms like Resources, Recipes, Cookbooks, The Chef Server, Roles, Environments, and Data Bags

Audience

This course has been designed for DevOps engineers wanting to learn Configuration Management with Chef and also for operations and development personnel wanting to become DevOps engineers.

About The Author

Venture Belafonte: Robin Beck and Sam McFadyen are co-owners of Venture Belafonte

Table of contents

  1. Chapter 1 : Welcome to Chef Fundamentals
    1. Chef Fundamentals - Is this class right for me?
    2. Course Roadmap
    3. Getting Started: Configuring Your Development Environment
    4. Exercise: Install the ChefDK
    5. Setup: Configure Your Lab Environment with Vagrant and Virtualbox
    6. Bonus Setup: Configure Your Lab Environment with Amazon Web Services
  2. Chapter 2 : Chef and Configuration Management
    1. What is Configuration Management?
    2. Infrastructure as Code
    3. Exercise: Your First Chef Recipe
    4. How Chef Thinks About System Components
  3. Chapter 3 : Resources: Chef's Basic Building Blocks
    1. Overview: Chef Resources
    2. Exploring System Resources
    3. Convergence and Desired State
    4. Exercise: Create a Workstation Setup Recipe
    5. Organizing Resources with Recipes
  4. Chapter 4 : Cookbooks
    1. Overview: Chef Resources
    2. Organizing Recipes with Cookbooks
    3. Cookbook Components
    4. Revision Control with Git
    5. Exercise: Deploy an Apache Webserver
  5. Chapter 5 : The chef-client run
    1. Overview: The chef-client run
    2. Applying Recipes and Cookbooks
    3. Exercise: The include_recipe method
  6. Chapter 6 : Ohai
    1. Overview: Taking System Inventory
    2. An Object Called 'Node'
    3. Accessing Node Attributes
    4. Exercise: Add Node Details to the Web Application
  7. Chapter 7 : Templates
    1. Overview: Using Template Resources
    2. Why Use Templates?
    3. Understanding Embedded Ruby
    4. Adding Templates to Recipes
    5. Exercise: Refactor the Web Application with a Template
  8. Chapter 8 : Other common Resources
    1. Overview: Other Common Resources
    2. cookbook_file
    3. remote_file
    4. execute
    5. user and group
    6. sending and receiving notifications
  9. Chapter 9 : Troubleshooting and Bonus Content
    1. Overview: Debugging, Linting, and Testing
    2. Explore the ChefDK
    3. Your Toolkit
    4. Overview: The Troubleshooting Process
    5. Overview: Demo: Breaking Things
    6. Bonus: Intro to Test Kitchen
    7. Bonus: Intro to ChefSpec
  10. Chapter 10 : The Chef Server
    1. Overview: Interfacing with a Chef Server
    2. Why use a Chef Server?
    3. Exercise: Getting Started with Hosted Chef
    4. Exercise: Uploading Cookbooks
    5. Exercise: Reconfigure Your Vagrant Environment
    6. Exercise: Bootstrap your Web Server
  11. Chapter 11 : Community Cookbooks
    1. Overview: Custom Cookbooks and the Chef Supermarket
    2. Exploring the Supermarket
    3. Create a Wrapper Cookbook
    4. Adding Webserver Members
    5. Managing Cookbooks with Berkshelf
    6. Exercise: Deploy a Load Balancer
  12. Chapter 12 : Managing Nodes
    1. Overview: Going Full-Scale
    2. Adding Nodes to your Organization
    3. Exercise: Add a Member to the Load Balancer
    4. Demo: Verifying Node Data with Knife
    5. Bonus: Run the chef-client on a Schedule
  13. Chapter 13 : Roles
    1. Overview: Managing run-lists
    2. Describing run-lists with Roles
    3. Demo: Methods for Creating and Assigning Roles
    4. Exercise: Create the load-balancer Role
    5. Bonus: Converge Using the 'knife ssh' Command
  14. Chapter 14 : Search
    1. Overview: Indexing and Search
    2. Exploring Chef Server Indices
    3. Running Searches with knife
    4. Demo: Refactor for Dynamic Load Balancing
    5. Exercise: Testing the Load Balancer
  15. Chapter 15 : Environments
    1. Overview: Control Your Deployment
    2. What is a Chef Environment?
    3. Creating and Managing a Production Environment
    4. Exercise: Deploy a Web Server to an Acceptance Environment
    5. Exercise: Refine the Load Balancer
  16. Chapter 16 : Data Bags
    1. Overview: Organizing Custom Data Sets
    2. What's in the Bag?
    3. Creating and Managing Data Bags
    4. Dynamic Search and Find
    5. Exercise: Creating Users and Groups with Search
    6. Demo: Encrypting Your Secrets
  17. Chapter 17 : Graduation: Further Resources
    1. What have we learned?
    2. Continuous Learning and Continuous Delivery
    3. Keep Learning and Practicing
    4. Your Chef Community

Product information

  • Title: Chef Fundamentals: A Recipe for Automating Infrastructure
  • Author(s): Venture Belafonte
  • Release date: March 2019
  • Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
  • ISBN: 9781838824839