Overview of Chef and All It Has to Offer

Getting Started With Chef

If you were working in IT even ten years ago, then unless you were working for a large company, you probably didn’t need to think about how to manage infrastructure in a scalable way. Back then servers were often on-premises, or in some nearby co-location data center; deployments were infrequent and were kind of like a section of chain, with each link made of a different material, with no consideration of how that link fit into the chain as a whole. At any moment one or more links were bound to break, leaving the deployment is some unforeseen state, that could at best, be described as “broken.”

Luckily for all of us, tools started to evolve out of primordial ooze that was, a random collection of Perl, Python, Ruby, and VBScript, among the other, more esoteric languages. Among those tools was Chef. It not only was among the earliest to evolve, but it has continued to evolve even today.

Chef helps companies around the world manage their infrastructure, in a scalable way. What makes Chef such a useful tool is that it provides a consistent way to interact with nodes, across your entire infrastructure. It also provides a way to test the infrastructure code, which allows you to apply years of software engineering best practices to your infrastructure.

In this lesson you’ll learn how to use Chef to manage your servers. You’ll learn about how to create your own recipes to configure a server to meet your desired state. You’ll also learn about using community created cookbooks from the Chef Supermarket. By the end of this lesson you’ll have a solid foundation, to get you started working with Chef.

Getting Started With Chef: What You'll Learn

Lecture	What you'll learn
Intro	What will be covered in this lesson
Overview	What is Chef and who uses it?
A High Level Architecture	A 30,000 foot view
The Anatomy of a Cookbook	How cookbooks are structured
The Recipe DSL	How recipes work
Setup	Setting up the workstation
Your First Recipe	Creating a recipe
Refactoring Your Recipe	Making the recipe cross-platform friendly
Deploying a Web Application	Deploying a LAMP based application
Setting Up The Chef Server	Preparing a Chef Server
Setting Up Nodes	Preparing some nodes to configure
Configuring The Nodes	Configuring The Nodes
Roles and Data Bags	Managing nodes with roles and accessing global data with data bags
Next Steps	How to keep learning

 

GitHub - Chef Code

The code used in the lesson can be found here on GitHub:
https://github.com/cloudacademy/chef-intro

If you have thoughts or suggestions for this lesson, please contact Cloud Academy at support@cloudacademy.com.