Mastering Chef Provisioning

Earl Waud

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781785888915
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Informatique
• Subtopic: Programmation en Ruby

Learn Chef Provisioning like a boss and finally own your infrastructure

About This Book

• This is the first Chef book focused on provisioning infrastructure as its sole task. The book offers a clear solution to a specific pain point: learn to make your system work faster.
• Learning better approaches to load balancing and parallelization with this book will save you time
• By mastering the techniques in this book, you will know how to run an entire fleet of machines without breaking a sweat
• This book is more helpful than the documentation ( https://docs.chef.io/provisioning.html), with a stronger guiding voice and clearer explanations and use cases

Who This Book Is For

This book is for Software Engineers, System Administrators, or DevOps Engineers who need to quickly deliver reliably consistent infrastructure at scale. You are expected to have intermediate experience with Chef and Ruby and will be reading this book to advance your knowledge and take your skillset to the next level.

What You Will Learn

• Use best practices to describe your entire infrastructure as code
• Automate and document every aspect of your network, from the hardware of individual nodes to software, middleware, and all containers and clouds
• Create a perfect model system
• Make the best possible use of your resources and avoid redundancy
• Deliver on the promise of Infrastructure as Code
• Scale with ease by properly provisioning their infrastructure
• Use the best Test Driven Development methodologies

In Detail

This book will show you the best practices to describe your entire infrastructure as code.

With the help of this book you can expand your knowledge of Chef because and implement robust and scalable automation solutions. You can automate and document every aspect of your network, from the hardware to software, middleware, and all your containers. You will become familiar with the Chef's Chef Provisioning tool. You will be able to make a perfect model system where everything is represented as code beneath your fingertips.

Make the best possible use of your resources, and deliver infrastructure as code, making it as versionable, testable and repeatable as application software

Style and approach

By dedicating a whole book solely to the question of provisioning, this book will teach administrators to use Chef as a birds-eye lens for their entire system. It will moves you away from the specifics of each machine and its automations and instead will teach you them how to approach the entire cluster as something different than the sum of its parts. By focusing on infrastructure as code as its own project, the book offers elegant, time-saving solutions for a perfectly described and automated network.

Mastering Chef Provisioning

---

Table of Contents

Mastering Chef Provisioning

Credits

Foreword

About the Author

Acknowledgments

About the Reviewer

www.PacktPub.com

eBooks, discount offers, and more

Why subscribe?

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Downloading the example code

Errata

Piracy

Questions

1. Setting Up a Development Environment on Your Workstation

Re-introducing Chef

What version of the Chef tools do I use?

References

Filling in the gaps in your Chef knowledge base

Major pieces of a Chef puzzle

The Chef client

The Ohai Chef tool

Recipes and cookbooks

Chef run lists

Chef roles

Chef resources

More things to consider

Data bags

Environments

The Chef supermarket

Chef Development Kit

Setting up an on-premise (private) Chef Server

References

Exploring the Chef Development Kit

The Chef Knife

Community tools

References

Installing Chef Development Kit

Downloading ChefDK

Installing ChefDK

Verifying ChefDK

References

Setting up a standard Chef repo

Using the Chef tool for Chef repo

The repo starter kit

Files for your .chef folder – a safer way

Growing your own tree

Self-signed certificates

References

What else do you need?

Using your favorite editor

Version control systems

Virtualization hypervisor

Vagrant

References

What is chef-apply?

Why is that useful?

References

Summary

2. Knife Tooling and Plugins

Knife help

References

Knife subcommands

Knife Bootstrap

Knife Node

Knife Diff

Knife Exec

Knife SSH

Knife Search

References

Knife to editor integration

Using the "wait" option

Does my editor require the wait option?

References

Knife Windows plugin

Installing the Knife Windows plugin

Bootstrapping a Windows node

Searching for Windows node data

References

Knife EC2 plugin

Installing the Knife EC2 plugin

Creating an EC2 instance

Bootstrapping an existing EC2 instance

Deleting EC2 instances

References

Creating new Knife plugins

The basic plugin file format

Example – A simpler EC2 Create Server plugin

References

Summary

3. Leveraging Roles, Environments, and Policies

Using Chef roles

How to create a role

Using per-environment run-lists in roles

Using nested roles

There is a downside to roles

References

Using Chef environments

The _default environment

Creating environments

Specifying cookbook versions in environments

References

Using Chef organizations

Creating organizations

Access control

References

Learning the attribute precedence hierarchy

Understanding attribute precedence factors

Resulting precedence hierarchy

Exploring policies

What exactly is a policy?

Why would I use a policy?

How do I use a policy?

Another example

How to specify the source options for cookbooks

What are the "Gotchas"?

References

Summary

4. Custom Resources

Out with the old (LWRPs), in with the new (Custom Resources)

What is the difference between the old way and the new way of defining resources?

What is a Custom Resource?

References

Creating an example use case

What is the goal?

Creating the cookbook

Creating the default recipe

The recipe worked, but what is missing?

References

Creating and using a Custom Resource

What makes up a Custom Resource?

Creating the "website" Custom Resource

Using our Custom Resource

References

Making a Custom Resource more reusable

Making a Custom Resource-only cookbook

Reuse the code from the "mywebapp" example

Using the reusable Custom Resource-only cookbook

Handling idempotence

References

Subclassing a Custom Resource

Convert our resource into a library module

Subclassing the library module Custom Resource

References

Summary

5. Provisioning in the Traditional Data Center

VMware provisioning

Installing the knife-vsphere plugin

Provisioning VMs using the knife-vsphere plugin

Cleaning up our vSphere and Chef environments

Using Chef with VMware and Vagrant

References

OpenStack provisioning

Setting up a DevStack OpenStack all-in-one environment

Deploying the DevStack Host VM

Downloading and installing DevStack

Downloading the demo project rc file and applying it

Adding the security rules to allow ping and ssh traffic

Installing the knife OpenStack plugin

Setting up the DevStack public key

Allocating some floating IP addresses to the project

Configuring the knife-openstack plugin knife settings

Adding a CentOS instance image to provision

Provisioning a new instance

References

Network automation

Automating juniper devices

Automating Cisco systems

Automating F5 LTMs

References

Summary

6. Provisioning in the Cloud

Provisioning AWS EC2 instances

Understanding EC2 authentication

Creating key pairs

Creating security groups

Installing Chef Server into an EC2 instance

References

Provisioning Microsoft Azure instances

Installing the knife-azure plugin

Configuring the plugin

Verifying the configuration

Generating public/private key pairs

Provisioning virtual machines

Provisioning a new Chef server into Azure

References

Provisioning in the Google Cloud platform

Installing and configuring the knife-google plugin

Creating and registering your key pairs

Provisioning virtual machines with the GCE

Deploying Chef server into a GCE instance

References

Looking at an honorable mention – Linode

References

Provisioning containers in Docker

Setting up a Docker server to host our containers

Installing and using Docker on our Chef Workstation

Using the knife-docker plugin

References

Summary

7. Test-Driven Development

Analyzing cookbooks with RuboCop

Using RuboCop

Examining the RuboCop output

Customizing RuboCop

References

Analyzing cookbooks with Foodcritic

Using Foodcritic

Examining the Foodcritic output

Customizing Foodcritic

References

Unit testing with ChefSpec

Using ChefSpec

Expanding our tests

References

Integration testing with Kitchen and ServerSpec

Preparing our tests

Kitchen create

Kitchen converge

Kitchen verify

References

Summary

8. Using Chef Provisioning

What is Chef provisioning?

It's highly idempotent

A hypothetical example

References

How to use Chef Provisioning

Chef Provisioning resources

A Vagrant example

A cloud example with AWS

A Docker example

References

Summary

Index

Mastering Chef Provisioning

Copyright © 2016 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publish...