Customizing Chef

Chapter 1. Introduction

Before we dive into the internals of Chef and look at all the different things we can customize, let’s take a step back, remind ourselves what we’re dealing with when we talk about configuration management, and look at why you might want or need to customize Chef in the first place and what you need to know to get the most out of this book.

What Is Configuration Management?

Time stands still for no man.

— Anonymous

The term configuration management has been in common usage since the 1950s, when the US Air Force developed an approach to managing the extremely complex manufacturing processes involved in producing military equipment. The USAF needed a way to make sure that its equipment performed as required, while also functioning as expected and complying with the relevant military equipment standards. The term was codified as an actual standard in the early 1960s, and the ideas underpinning CM have since been adopted by a number of other industries, such as civil and industrial engineering and, of course, computing.

What we think of as configuration management in the IT sense has been around in one form or another for as long as people have been running more than one computer, although it was not always recognized as such. Looking back through the mists of time to the era of mainframes and minicomputers, we find system administrators tending single, monolithic systems, every tunable setting and parameter committed to memory or to multivolume technical manuals. ...