Chapter 6. Provisioning in the Cloud

This chapter will expand the previous chapter and explore the use of Chef for deployment and configuration in the cloud. Much like VMware is the 600 pound gorilla in the data center, Amazon is the 600 pound gorilla in the cloud. Amazon is the first provider that comes to mind when people ask about the cloud, and it has the biggest market share, at least so far. They currently host about 30 percent of cloud-based systems, which is a larger percentage than the next three providers combined. With that kind of dominance in the cloud market, you might ask why learn how to provision to any other cloud provider? Well, because Microsoft and Google are currently the fastest growing providers. Microsoft has already grabbed about 12 percent of the market share and is growing at a much faster rate than Amazon. And not one to be out done, Google is not too far behind Microsoft. Let the cloud provider wars begin! So, in this chapter, the reader will learn...