Looking at an honorable mention – Linode

Here is a quick look at the Chef integration to provision to the hosting provider Linode.com. While Linode has nowhere near the market share of any of the top hosting providers we've covered so far, there is a strong user base of passionate developers (like my colleague Barry Ruffner who introduced me to Linode) and many happy companies who use the hosting service to fill their Linux-based hosts needs with distros from CentOS, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Ubuntu, and Slackware, to name a few. And just like with the other hosting providers we discussed, you have the ability to create and manage your servers hosted there with a knife plugin, knife-linode. You can install the plugin with the now familiar Chef command:

chef gem install knife-linode

As with our other plugins, you will want to add a linode configuration parameter to your knife.rb file so you don't have to provide the parameter with each command. It will contain your API key, which can be generated...