Test-Driven Infrastructure with Chef, 2nd Edition

Chapter 8. Epilogue

This is a substantial book, covering a large and rapidly expanding subject area. Constraints have been imposed at various stages for purely practical reasons. In this final section, I want to enumerate very briefly what some of these constraints are, what has been specifically left out of scope, what I hope to be able to include in further incarnations, and where additional guidance, documentation, and support may be found.

An immediate constraint is that while I had every intention of making this book 100% compatible with Microsoft Windows, doing so would have expanded the examples and setup by a significant factor. It’s not that Windows is in any way a less supported citizen, it’s just that there are nuances involved, both in terms of its automation as a server platform and its use as a development platform, which led me to focus my attentions on Linux as the primary use case in this text. As a technologist, I am very enthusiastic about the Microsoft technology stack, and as a consultant and trainer, I have worked extensively with Windows infrastructure automation. As an area of interest, it is something I intend to devote more dedicated time and material to in the near future.

An explicit and hopefully obvious constraint is that this is a practical and philosophical book about the process by which we develop infrastructure code. It’s not a complete introduction or tutorial for Chef, nor is it an advanced or comprehensive discussion of the framework. That said, ...