Introduction

Automation through Opscode Chef provides an in-depth understanding of chef, which is written in Ruby and Erlang for configuration management, cloud infrastructure management, system administration, and network management.

Targeted at administrators, consultants, and architects, the book guides them through the advanced features of the tool that are necessary for infrastructure automation, DevOps automation, and reporting. The book presumes knowledge of Ruby and Erlang, which are used as reference languages for creating recipes and cookbooks and as a refresher to help the reader get on speed with the flow of book.

The book provides step-by-step instructions on the installation and configuration of chef, usage scenarios of chef, in infrastructure automation with common scenarios such as virtual machine provisioning, OS configuration for Windows, Linux, and Unix, and provisioning and configuration of web servers like Apache along with popular databases like MySQL.

It further elaborates on the creation of recipes and cookbooks, which help in the deployment of servers and applications to any physical, virtual, or cloud location, no matter the size of the infrastructure.

The book covers advanced features like LWRPs (lightweight resource providers) and knife and also contains several illustrative sample cookbooks on MySQL, Apache, and CouchDB deployment using a step-by-step approach.