about the technology

The servers, applications, and services in your technology infrastructure can become a daunting network of micro-environments, each with its own configuration and maintenance needs. With Chef, a powerful open source configuration management tool, you can standardize and automate many of your most important administrative tasks. Chef puts reproducible infrastructure within any sysadmin's grasp, an important step in adopting the DevOps mindset of "infrastructure as code."

For example, after you've established the procedure in Chef, standing up a new server to test the most recent changes to your app takes only a few minutes. Tearing it down and recreating the same environment becomes a push-button process, and you can rest assured that your configuration is exactly as you want it to be. Chef also makes it possible to dynamically create and destroy servers in response to changes in load.

what's inside

• Principles of configuration management
• Automating your infrastructure
• Writing Chef cookbooks
• Creating testable infrastructure
• Adopting the DevOps mindset
• Chef in the cloud

about the reader

Written for administrators and developers with basic understanding of distributed applications and network infrastructure. No prior experience with Chef or infrastructure automation required.

about the author

Dimitri Aivaliotis is a Systems Architect who has been working on Linux/UNIX systems for over a decade. He has implemented Chef to cover all aspects of hosting, from dedicated machines, through cloud-based hosting, and on to specific services made available to end-users.