Mastering Chef Provisioning

Key Features

This is the first Chef book focused on provisioning infrastructure as its sole task. The book offers a clear solution to a specific pain point: learn to make your system work faster.
Learning better approaches to load balancing and parallelization with this book will save you time
By mastering the techniques in this book, you will know how to run an entire fleet of machines without breaking a sweat
This book is more helpful than the documentation ( https://docs.chef.io/provisioning.html), with a stronger guiding voice and clearer explanations and use cases

Book Description

This book will show you the best practices to describe your entire infrastructure as code.

With the help of this book you can expand your knowledge of Chef because and implement robust and scalable automation solutions. You can automate and document every aspect of your network, from the hardware to software, middleware, and all your containers. You will become familiar with the Chef's Chef Provisioning tool. You will be able to make a perfect model system where everything is represented as code beneath your fingertips.

Make the best possible use of your resources, and deliver infrastructure as code, making it as versionable, testable and repeatable as application software

What you will learn

Use best practices to describe your entire infrastructure as code
Automate and document every aspect of your network, from the hardware of individual nodes to software, middleware, and all containers and clouds
Create a perfect model system
Make the best possible use of your resources and avoid redundancy
Deliver on the promise of Infrastructure as Code
Scale with ease by properly provisioning their infrastructure
Use the best Test Driven Development methodologies

About the Author

Earl Waud is a virtualization development professional with more than 10 years of focused industry experience, creating innovative solutions for hypervisor provisioning, management, and automation. He is an expert in aligning engineering strategy with organizational vision and goals, and delivering highly scalable and user friendly virtualization environments.

With more than 20 years of experience developing customer-facing and corporate IT software solutions, he has a proven track record of delivering high-caliber and on-time technology solutions that significantly impact business results.

Earl lives in San Diego, California. He is blessed with a beautiful wife, Patti, and three amazing daughters, Alexis, Daniella, and Madison.

Currently, Earl is a senior software engineer with Intuit Inc., a company that creates business and financial management solutions that simplify the business of life for small businesses, consumers, and accounting professionals.

Earl can be found online at http://sandiegoearl.com.

Table of Contents

Setting Up a Development Environment on Your Workstation
Knife Tooling and Plugins
Leveraging Roles, Environments, and Policies
Custom Resources
Provisioning in the Traditional Data Center
Provisioning in the Cloud
Test-Driven Development
Using Chef Provisioning