Chef Essentials

John Ewart

Sep 2014 · Packt Publishing Ltd

About this ebook

If you have some understanding of IT infrastructure principles and are ready to find out what Chef is all about, then this guide will show you all you need to know. In order to get the most out of this book, some experience of programming or scripting languages would be useful.

Ratings and reviews

I’ve been using Puppet for some years now. This is the first Chef book I read. And I think I got a good overview of what Chef is and how to use it. It gives you a good start and then I guess the best way forward is to explore what other people have done with Chef. I whole chapter is dedicated to testning which is good. I highly recommend some ruby experience before reading this book. Otherwise some of it will be hard to understand.

Managing a mid or greater sized IT infrastructure could sometimes become pain for administrators to. To make the job manageable and easier, the Chef framework is reliable in getting the job done. In the book, the step-wise procedure from installing, configuring & deploying the chef server has been nicely explained. In addition to that, integrating the framework with the cloud is also explained which enhances the utility of the framework in case of larger deployment scenario. The most interesting part of the chef server is the use of 'recipes' that makes the work of managing the IT infrastructure much more manageable. Features like user management and encrypting data, key management also adds up the security feature of the framework. A really good book for managing IT infrastructure in an efficient and smart way.

Infrastructure automation is an extremely vital expertise nowadays because of rise of Cloud Computing in recent years. Chef, configuration management tool is very popular nowadays and hence I was keen to get my hands on Chef. Lot of material is available on Internet including tutorials and blogs but I found a Book Chef Essentials on Packetpub. To my surprise, the book covers great deal of details in first three chapters itself. Installation, Configuration and Integrating with one of the most popular Public Cloud – Amazon Web Services in first three chapters is a sheer delight. Technical language used to explain the concepts is very easily understandable. With AWS, it provides details on provisioning and terminating instances and various other information as well. Basic concepts have been covered in an exemplary manner considering beginners. It also provides detail coverage of developing custom extensions and User management which is extremely essential. All and all for beginners, this book is a great way to start and gain insights into Chef and also having full hands on in various Cloud Platforms. It also explains application deployment on EC2 using sample python application.

About the author

John Ewart is a system architect, software developer, and lecturer. He has designed and taught courses at a variety of institutions, including the University of California, The California State University, and local community colleges. These courses cover a wide range of computer science topics, including Java, data structures and algorithms, operating systems fundamentals, Unix and Linux system administration, and web application development. In addition to working and teaching, he maintains and contributes to a number of open source projects. He currently resides in Redmond, Washington, with his wife, Mary, and their two children.