Preface

Today, the DevOps Engineer is responsible for delivering infrastructure that is rock solid and consistently configured every time. What's more, these superheroes need to supply the infrastructure rapidly and at scale, often to the tune of dozens or even hundreds of identically configured systems.

The days of doing this superhero work manually are long gone. Now the only question is "which superpower will best serve our heroes in their time of greatest need?" The answer is the power that can transform their infrastructure into code so that it can be managed the same way as any other source code-based project. Chef is that superpower.

And Mastering Chef Provisioning is your secret decoder ring for learning how to use that power to provision containers, servers, and networking devices across the universe of hosting targets, including your local workstation, the traditional data center, and in the clouds.

In this book, you will learn the secrets of how to automate and document every aspect of your infrastructure. You will find the best practices for describing your infrastructure as code. You will learn to automate the provisioning of everything from the smallest container deployed to your local workstation to the biggest distributed application clusters deployed to the cloud, all in a single bound.

This book will help you, the DevOps superhero, to create a perfect model system where everything is represented as code beneath your fingertips. You will be able to make the best possible use of your resources, avoid redundancy, and always be ready to scale—faster than a speeding bullet. And you don't have to leave your home planet, get bitten by a radioactive spider, or fall in a vat of toxic waste to do it.

But as the great Stan Lee wrote, "With great power …".