Configuration Management with Chef-Solo

A comprehensive guide to get you up and running with Chef-Solo

Overview

• Explore various techniques that will help you save time in Infrastructure management
• Use the power of Chef-Solo to run your servers and configure and deploy applications in an automated manner
• This book will help you to understand the need for the configuration management tool and provides you with a step-by-step guide to maintain your existing infrastructure

In Detail

Chef is a configuration management tool used to handle the hardest part of infrastructure, easing the deployment of servers and applications to any infrastructure. Chef-Solo is an open source version of the chef-client that allows you to use cookbooks with nodes, without requiring access to a Chef server. In any infrastructure, managing servers is one of the most critical tasks for any server administration. Chef-Solo makes the process of booting and provisioning many machines at the same time much easier.

Configuration Management with Chef-Solo will take you through the workflow of managing one or more servers. It includes many sample recipes to start with, and gradually you will take a look at the different interaction points and will also learn how Chef-Solo helps minimize your efforts to build and manage different machines. You will learn how to run servers while executing Ruby code. This hands-on guide will help you to understand the importance of this amazing configuration management tool.

What you will learn from this book

• Define your infrastructure as code in Chef
• Set up a testing and production environment with Chef-Solo
• Test the incremental development of a project with Vagrant
• Develop recipes and manage web and database roles
• Automate tedious manual tasks
• Learn to use data bags and write clean cookbooks
• Create a Docker image using cookbooks
• Manage and scale your cloud infrastructure by automating your configuration management

Approach

This is a step-by-step guide, full of hands-on examples of real-world deployment tasks. Each topic is explained and placed in context, while also pointing out the key details of the concepts used.

Who this book is written for

This book is aimed at system administrators and system engineers who have an understanding of configuration management tools and infrastructure. For novice administrators, it contains easy-to-use application recipes to get started immediately.