Chef and cloud provisioning

Chef is not only used for setting up runtime environments or configuration management, but it is also used for resource provisioning in cloud environments. It supports cloud service providers such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, VMware, OpenStack, HP Cloud, and Google Compute Engine. Chef provides more flexibility to the concept of infrastructure as a code and brings configuration management into the picture as well. Knife plugins are used to manage or use different cloud service providers. With knife plugins, it is easier to provision and deprovision resources along with controlled and centralized configuration management. In this chapter we will focus on infrastructure provisioning in Cloud environment and setting up runtime environment as shown in below diagram:

We will specifically focus on infrastructure provisioning in a cloud environment and setting up a runtime environment with a configuration management tool:

We will provision resources in...