Mastering Chef

Chef is a configuration management tool that turns IT infrastructure into code. Chef provides tools to manage systems at scale. This book will take you through the Chef code, tools, and components to manage your environments using the Chef server efficiently. The book starts with an introduction to the Chef ecosystem, taking you through the terminologies used in Chef, the anatomy of a chef-client run, and Chef solo. You will learn how to use Knife and its associated plugins to accomplish daily routine tasks in a more efficient way. You will also learn how to speed this up by using Ruby with Chef, which will allow you to write more efficient infrastructure code. This book then introduces you to cookbooks and how to extend chef-client through the use of Lightweight Resource/Provider. It tells you how to keep all kind of configurations in key-value pair efficiently, by introducing you to data bags and templates. Then you will get a walkthrough of Chef's wonderful APIs and the extended functionalities of Chef. By the end of the book you will be so well-versed with Chef that you'll be able to explore some fun uses of Chef, which will allow for better productivity.