Automation through Chef Opscode, 1st ed. A Hands-on Approach to Chef

Automation through Chef Opscode provides an in-depth understanding of Chef, which is written in Ruby and Erlang for configuration management, cloud infrastructure management, system administration, and network management.

Targeted at administrators, consultants, and architect, the book guides them through the advanced features of the tool which are necessary for infrastructure automation, devops automation, and reporting. The book presumes knowledge of Ruby and Erlang which are used as reference languages for creating recipes and cookbooks and as a refresher on them to help the reader get on speed with the flow of book.

The book provides step by step instructions on installation and configuration of Chef, usage scenarios of Chef,  in infrastructure automation by providing common scenarios like virtual machine provisioning, OS configuration for Windows, Linux, and Unix,  provisioning and configuration of web servers like Apache along with popular databases like MySQL.

It further elaborates on the creation of recipes, and cookbooks, which help in deployment of servers and applications to any physical, virtual, or cloud location, no matter the size of the infrastructure.

The books covers advanced featureslike LWRPs and Knife and also contains several illustrative sample cookbooks on MySQL, Apache, and CouchDB deployment using a step by step approach.

Chapter 1 Introduction

Chapter 2 The Chef Server

Chapter 3 Installing and configuring the Chef Server

Chapter 4 Installing and configuring a Workstation

Chapter 5 Nodes

Chapter 6 Knife

Chapter 7 Cookbooks

Chapter 8 Using Cookbooks

Chapter 9 Develop a Complex Cookbook

Chapter 10 Resource and Providers

Chapter 11 HA

Chapter 12 Cloud Provisioning with Vagrant and Chef

Chapter 13 Troubleshooting

NavinSabharwal is an innovator, thought leader, author, andconsultant in the areas of reporting and Analytics, RDBMS technologiesincluding SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, big data technologies, Hadoop, MongoDB,and SAP HANA. Navin has been using big data technologies in creating productsand services in the areas of IT service management, product development, cloudcomputing, cloud lifecycle management, and social network product development.He has created niche award-winning products and solutions and has filednumerous patents in diverse fields such as IT services, assessment engines,ranking algorithms, capacity planning engines, and knowledge management. Navinholds a Master’s in Information Technology and is a Certified ProjectManagement Professional.