Mastering Chef Provisioning: Render your entire infrastructure as code with Chef

Waud

$24.99 ~~$35.99~~

4.3 (7 Ratings)

eBook Jun 2016 262 pages 1st Edition

Waud

$24.99 ~~$35.99~~

4.3 (7 Ratings)

eBook Jun 2016 262 pages 1st Edition

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Key benefits

This is the first Chef book focused on provisioning infrastructure as its sole task. The book offers a clear solution to a specific pain point: learn to make your system work faster.
Learning better approaches to load balancing and parallelization with this book will save you time
By mastering the techniques in this book, you will know how to run an entire fleet of machines without breaking a sweat
This book is more helpful than the documentation (https://docs.chef.io/provisioning.html), with a stronger guiding voice and clearer explanations and use cases

Description

This book will show you the best practices to describe your entire infrastructure as code. With the help of this book you can expand your knowledge of Chef because and implement robust and scalable automation solutions. You can automate and document every aspect of your network, from the hardware to software, middleware, and all your containers. You will become familiar with the Chef’s Chef Provisioning tool. You will be able to make a perfect model system where everything is represented as code beneath your fingertips. Make the best possible use of your resources, and deliver infrastructure as code, making it as versionable, testable and repeatable as application software

Who is this book for?

This book is for Software Engineers, System Administrators, or DevOps Engineers who need to quickly deliver reliably consistent infrastructure at scale. You are expected to have intermediate experience with Chef and Ruby and will be reading this book to advance your knowledge and take your skillset to the next level.

What you will learn

Use best practices to describe your entire infrastructure as code
Automate and document every aspect of your network, from the hardware of individual nodes to software, middleware, and all containers and clouds
Create a perfect model system
Make the best possible use of your resources and avoid redundancy
Deliver on the promise of Infrastructure as Code
Scale with ease by properly provisioning their infrastructure
Use the best Test Driven Development methodologies

What do you get with eBook?

Instant access to your Digital eBook purchase

Download this book in EPUB and PDF formats

Access this title in our online reader with advanced features

DRM FREE - Read whenever, wherever and however you want

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Barry R Jan 03, 2017

All of the basics where available right away to get up and running quickly. Every example or step by step I followed worked without issues.The third chapter covers roles, environments, and a variety of other pieces of a organizational hierarchy. The explanations are clear and concise and helped me understand and effectively use them. The information for the attributes are especially helpful in that for the first time I found them in one spot and explained without any superfluous details.Another great resource I found in the book was on Custom Resources. I hadn't used Chef in a while and didn't even realize LWRP/HWRP are no longer the preferred way to work. This really seems to simply things and the examples were great and were a good introduction.

Amazon Verified review

Jay F. Grissom Jul 26, 2016

All the ambiguous details about chef seem to be answered here...The Chef/DevOps ecosystem has a lot of people that are highly skilled. This is a double edged blade. Lots of smart experienced people generally means that they have a LOT of assumptions about how much you know regarding the tools you're using. Earl has managed to slip all the key details that close the loop in your understanding without overwhelming you.If you've spent any time researching why the starter kit hoses up your Org if you download it more than once, or how your org pem files should be best handled, or what vagrant is and why it is used then you have an idea of the details I'm talking about. There are many little nuggets of useful information throughout this book. Most of the time Earl just slips the jewel right into the context of the topic so smoothly you don't even realize you learned it until you go to do something with your Chef environment and end up leaning on it.This kind of valueable information is the stuff that you would normally have to go research for hours to get a good understanding of. In my opinion, these insights alone more than cover the cost of this book.His use of clear language to explain some very complex topics makes this a must have for anyone serious about server provisioning automation.The title of the book has the word "Mastering" in it. In my experience that often means overly verbose explanations are going to be filler all over the place. In this case the short concise explanations for everything make it a refreshing read that doesn't leave you loaded down with more questions than answers.Admittedly, the reading can be a little dry at times. When that happens it is usually related to laying out steps for getting things done. He has clearly focused on accuracy and doesn't try to impress you with fancy words when he's laying something out. For the most part Earl's character comes through and that is a good thing (he is obviously a pop-culture fan and likes to use terms like super hero to describe good things). The combination of his character and the clarity of this work more than make up for occasional bouts of dry content. Reading this book has kept me up until midnight more than a few night so clearly it's not a snoozer...I'm really pleased that I picked this up and I'm looking forward to reading more from Mr. Waud.

Earl Waud Jan 09, 2019

Hi.This is Earl, the author of Mastering Chef Provisioning.I apologize for adding a review of my own book, but I wanted to share with potential readers that I disagree with Michael when he states in his review that this book is not about Chef Provisioning. The book actually is all about the many ways of provisioning using Chef.And contrary to what Michael shared, the provisioning feature "Chef Provisioning" has a full chapter dedicated to it (Chapter 8). That chapter teaches what the feature "Chef Provisioning" is and how to use it, and includes separate examples of using "Chef Provisioning" to provision to Vagrant, AWS, and Docker.Check out the table of contents in the "Look Inside" preview and you will see for yourself.I would like to thank Michael for the comment: "The content, itself, is good and covers the process of provisioning new nodes in a variety of on-premise and cloud situations using the knife cli in addition to explaining several of the fundamental aspects of chef including how to make custom resources (which is invaluable)". I agree with him on these points. :-)Thanks,-Earl

Mindi Jul 19, 2016

This is a great book to begin quickly. I've started to create LWRPs a few times, but couldn't get a couple hours back-to-back to read through the docs and thoroughly understand how to build them. With Chef Provisioning, I'd created a Custom Resource from the book in about 15 minutes. It gave me enough information that I could quickly create and apply what I'd learned to a new solution.

Brett W. Aug 11, 2016

Excellent book for anyone who wants a roadmap to deploy Chef, at scale, to support production applications in an enterprise environment. The book covers both the development and testing of Chef resources, as well as deploying them to both a traditional data center or the cloud. It covers the major players in both the cloud and on-prem including AWS, Azure, Google Compute, OpenStack and VMware. The author's deep experience in leveraging Chef at scale is evident in the writing.

Mastering Chef Provisioning: Render your entire infrastructure as code with Chef

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