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Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook - Second Edition by Matthias Marschall (29-May-2015) Paperback
Irrespective of whether you're a systems administrator or a developer, if you're sick and tired of repetitive manual work and not knowing whether you may dare to reboot your server, it's time for you to get your infrastructure automated. Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook has all the required recipes to configure, deploy, and scale your servers and applications, irrespective of whether you manage 5 servers, 5,000 servers, or 500,000 servers. Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook is a collection of easy-to-follow, step-by-step recipes showing you how to solve real-world automation challenges. Learn techniques from the pros and make sure you get your infrastructure automation project right the first time. Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook takes you on a journey through the many facets of Chef. It teaches you simple techniques as well as fully fledged real-world solutions. By looking at easily digestible examples, you'll be able to grasp the main concepts of Chef, which you'll need for automating your own infrastructure. Instead of wasting time trying to get existing community cookbooks running in your environment, you'll get ready made code examples to get you started. After describing how to use the basic Chef tools, the book shows you how to troubleshoot your work and explains the Chef language. Then, it shows you how to manage users, applications, and your whole cloud infrastructure. The book concludes by providing you additional, indispensable tools and giving you an in-depth look into the Chef ecosystem. Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook will help you learn the techniques of the pros by walking you through a host of step-by-step guides to solve real-world infrastructure automation challenges. Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook contains practical recipes on everything you will need to automate your infrastructure using Chef. The book is packed with illustrated code examples to automate your server and cloud infrastructure. The book first shows you the simplest way to achieve a certain task. Then it explains every step in detail, so that you can build your knowledge about how things work. Eventually, the book shows you additional things to consider for each approach. That way, you can learn step-by-step and build profound knowledge on how to go about your configuration management automation. This book is for system engineers and administrators who have a fundamental understanding of information management systems and infrastructure. It helps if you've already played around with Chef; however, the book covers all the important topics you will need to know. If you don't want to dig through a whole book before you can get started, this book is for you, as it features a set of independent recipes you can try out immediately.
Unknown Binding
First published May 29, 2015
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 30, 2014
The steep learning curve and lack of good documentation has always been a problem with complex open source software like Chef so it is good to see an author providing material.
With technical books it important to understand the scope of the book. Is it a Reference book, an introduction or what.
The title says it is a Cookbook and that is what it is. It is a tutorial for getting up and running in chef. It is very comprehensive in provide the commands and the tutorials to learn to do stuff in chef. It is a "doing" book that you need to follow along.
It is not an introduction. I would recommend first doing the:
free learnchef at https://learnchef.opscode.com/
and looking at the sample code in Chef Resources at http://docs.opscode.com/chef/resource...
before attempting the tutorials.
Personally I think it could be improved by adding more diagrams and explanations and a bit more structure to the information. It just flows over the pages so it would be better if each piece of tutorial started at the top of the page so you can reference it more easily later. He only give a couple of lines of explanation before launching in to the commands to do the particular task so a bit more explanation of the why as well as how what be good.
In summary, good information to a currently poorly served area but not a book for absolute beginners.
With technical books it important to understand the scope of the book. Is it a Reference book, an introduction or what.
The title says it is a Cookbook and that is what it is. It is a tutorial for getting up and running in chef. It is very comprehensive in provide the commands and the tutorials to learn to do stuff in chef. It is a "doing" book that you need to follow along.
It is not an introduction. I would recommend first doing the:
free learnchef at https://learnchef.opscode.com/
and looking at the sample code in Chef Resources at http://docs.opscode.com/chef/resource...
before attempting the tutorials.
Personally I think it could be improved by adding more diagrams and explanations and a bit more structure to the information. It just flows over the pages so it would be better if each piece of tutorial started at the top of the page so you can reference it more easily later. He only give a couple of lines of explanation before launching in to the commands to do the particular task so a bit more explanation of the why as well as how what be good.
In summary, good information to a currently poorly served area but not a book for absolute beginners.
May 14, 2014
Quite a nice as a reference material.
Cookbooks are related to quite common software so it's not hard to find them applicable.
What I was missing was something like a walkthrough to create such a cookbook (Chapter 4 is not enough): for instance some of the particular recipes could have been presented in a more thorough way to show the way to create such a cookbook.
I really like Chapter I (Chef Infrastructure) - it's a nice overview, but in my opinion in needs more love (to get more elaborate). What I didn't like? Section about testing the cookbooks is far too brief (as the topic is quite complex).
The best proof of this book's value is that I was getting back to it quite often.
Cookbooks are related to quite common software so it's not hard to find them applicable.
What I was missing was something like a walkthrough to create such a cookbook (Chapter 4 is not enough): for instance some of the particular recipes could have been presented in a more thorough way to show the way to create such a cookbook.
I really like Chapter I (Chef Infrastructure) - it's a nice overview, but in my opinion in needs more love (to get more elaborate). What I didn't like? Section about testing the cookbooks is far too brief (as the topic is quite complex).
The best proof of this book's value is that I was getting back to it quite often.
November 6, 2013
After picking up basics of Chef framework, Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook is a must read. Among Chef framework itself, it also covers techniques such as testing, as well as integration with tools and technologies like Vagrant and AWS, with excellent examples. Management of cookbook dependencies is lot easier with tools like Berkshelf, and author follows that practice from the beginning to the end.
January 2, 2015
Excellent reference.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews