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Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook
Over 80 recipes to automate your cloud and server infrastructure with Chef and its associated toolset About This Book
Automate error-prone and tedious manual tasks and manage your servers on-site or in the cloud
Equip yourself with Chef components such as Chef client and solo, and learn how to create simple Chef cookbooks and various other artifacts for managing systems with Chef when live
Packed with working code and easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions to configure, deploy, and scale your applications
Who This Book Is For
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, this 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.
What You Will Learn Set up your local development and testing environment for Chef Debug your cookbooks and Chef runs by using the numerous inspection and logging facilities of Chef Drive your cookbooks from external data or node-specific attributes Manage and scale your cloud infrastructure by automating your configuration management Extend Chef to meet your advanced needs by creating custom plugins for knife and Ohai Test your Chef cookbooks and infrastructure by writing examples In DetailChef is a configuration management tool that lets you automate your more cumbersome IT infrastructure processes and control a large network of computers (and virtual machines) from one master server.
This book takes you through covering the various artifacts of Chef and explains the techniques of building full-fledged real-world solutions. After describing how to use the basic Chef command-line tools such as knife and Berkshelf, the book will show you how to troubleshoot your work. It will also take you through the core concepts of managing users, applications, and your entire cloud infrastructure. This book 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.
280 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 29, 2015
3 people are currently reading
52 people want to read
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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