Using Chef Solo on Windows for AWS

Lab Overview

Chef is a popular configuration management tool. It has built-in support for Windows and a thriving community providing convenient cookbooks for managing Windows configurations. This Lab will get you up and running with Chef Solo and help you configure a local Windows host on AWS using Chef. You will then explore Chef cookbook dependencies and the Chocolatey Windows package manager. Finally, you will configure the host to serve an Internet Information Services (IIS) website.

Lab Objectives

Upon completion of this lab you will be able to:

• Install and set up Chef Solo on an AWS Windows VM
• Run Chef recipes with Windows-specific resources
• Use guards to enforce Chef resource idempotence
• Manage Chef cookbook dependencies with Berkshelf
• Configure Microsoft's IIS web server with Chef Solo 

Lab Prerequisites

You should be familiar with the following:

• Chef concepts
• Working at the command line
• Windows and PowerShell experience are beneficial, but not required

Lab Environment

Before completing the lab instructions, the environment will look as follows:

After completing the lab instructions, the environment should look similar to:

 

Updates

January 12th, 2020 - Updated to the latest Windows Server 2019 Amazon Machine Image (AMI)

February 15th, 2019 - Updated to the latest Windows Server 2016 Amazon Machine Image (AMI)

January 10th, 2019 - Added a validation Lab Step to check the work you perform in the Lab