Chef: Powerful Infrastructure Automation

Modeling your infrastructure

Now that you're more familiar with some of the terms you need to know, let's take a look at a sample model and map it to Chef's components. At a higher level, the approach we will take is as follows:

1. Define an overview of your infrastructure that is decomposed into roles to be performed within the model (web servers, firewalls, database servers, and so on).
2. Collect or develop recipes that describe the configuration, software, and actions to be applied for those roles.
3. Bootstrap hosts with the Chef client so that they can participate in being managed.
4. Add any required configuration data into data bags to be used by nodes when running recipes such as IP address ranges, hostnames, users, software keys, or anything else that ...