About this eBook
This book is for system engineers and administrators who have a fundamental understanding of information management systems and infrastructure. It is also for DevOps Engineers, IT professionals, and organizations who want to automate and gain greater control of their infrastructures with Chef. No experience with Chef is needed, but may help.
What You Will LearnTest your cookbooks with Test KitchenManage cookbook dependencies with BerkshelfUse reporting to keep track of what happens during the execution of chef-client runs across all of the machinesCreate custom Ohai and Knife pluginsBuild a high-availability service using HeartbeatUse a HAProxy to load-balance multiple web serversIn 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 will help you solve everyday problems with your IT infrastructure with Chef. It will start with recipes that show you how to effectively manage your infrastructure and solve problems with users, applications, and automation. You will then come across a new testing framework, InSpec, to test any node in your infrastructure.
Further on, you will learn to customize plugins and write cross-platform cookbooks depending on the platform. You will also install packages from a third-party repository and learn how to manage users and applications. Toward the end, you will build high-availability services and explore what Habitat is and how you can implement it.
Style and approachThis book follows a recipe-based approach and covers all the important topics you need to know. If you don't want to dig through a whole book before you get started, this book is for you, as it features a set of independent recipes you can try out immediately.
About the author
Matthias Marschall is a Software Engineer "made in Germany". His four children make sure that he feels comfortable in lively environments, and stays in control of chaotic situations. A lean and agile engineering lead, he's passionate about continuous delivery, infrastructure automation, and all things DevOps. In recent years, Matthias has helped build several web-based businesses, first with Java and then with Ruby on Rails. He quickly grew into system administration, writing his own configuration management tool before migrating his whole infrastructure to Chef in its early days. In 2008, he started a blog (http://www.agileweboperations.com) together with Dan Ackerson. There, they have shared their ideas about DevOps since the early days of the continually emerging movement. You can find him on Twitter as @mmarschall. Matthias holds a Master's degree in Computer Science (Dipl.-Inf. (FH)) and teaches courses on Agile Software Development at the University of Augsburg. When not writing or coding, Matthias enjoys drawing cartoons and playing Go. He lives near Munich, Germany.
