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Mastering Chef

You're reading from   Mastering Chef Build, deploy, and manage your IT infrastructure to deliver a successful automated system with Chef in any environment

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Product type Paperback
Published in Jun 2015
Publisher
ISBN-13 9781783981564
Length 374 pages
Edition 1st Edition
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Author (1):
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Mayank Joshi Mayank Joshi
Author Profile Icon Mayank Joshi
Mayank Joshi
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Table of Contents (15) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Introduction to the Chef Ecosystem FREE CHAPTER 2. Knife and Its Associated Plugins 3. Chef and Ruby 4. Controlling Access to Resources 5. Starting the Journey to the World of Recipes 6. Cookbooks and LWRPs 7. Roles and Environments 8. Attributes and Their Uses 9. Ohai and Its Plugin Ecosystem 10. Data Bags and Templates 11. Chef API and Search 12. Extending Chef 13. (Ab)Using Chef Index

Chapter 1. Introduction to the Chef Ecosystem

Chef is a configuration management system written partly in Ruby and Erlang.

Before we begin our exciting journey towards becoming Chef masters, I think it would be prudent on our part to understand the underlying ecosystem.

The Chef ecosystem is primarily comprised of the following components:

  • WebUI: This is a Rails application that is used to view information about the Chef server over the Web.
  • ErChef: Prior to version 11.x, the Chef server API core (the code responsible for catering to requests by Knife or chef-client) was written in Ruby. However, since 11.x, this code has been rewritten in Erlang.
  • Bookshelf: This is used to store cookbooks content such as files, templates, and so on, that have been uploaded to chef-server as part of a cookbook version.
  • chef-solr: This is a wrapper around Apache Solr and is used to handle the REST API for indexing and search.
  • Rabbit MQ: This is used as a message queue for the Chef server. All items that are to be added to a search index repository are first added to a queue.
  • chef-expander: This is a piece of code that pulls messages from the RabbitMQ queue, processes them into a desired format, and finally posts them to Solr for indexing.
  • PostgreSQL: This is another major change since version 11.x. Earlier, CouchDB used to be the data storage; however, since version 11.x, PostgreSQL has become the data storage solution used by Chef.
  • chef-client: This is a Ruby application that runs on every machine that needs to be provisioned. It handles the task of authenticating with chef-server, registering nodes, synchronizing cookbooks, compiling resource collections, handling exceptions and notifications, and so on.
  • Knife: This is a Ruby application that provides an interface between a local chef repository and the Chef server.

The typical architecture of the Chef ecosystem can be understood by looking at the following figure:

Introduction to the Chef Ecosystem

Other than these components, we've chef-shell (shef), Ohai, and chef-solo that form an integral part of the chef ecosystem. We also have chef-zero, which is being adopted by people to quickly test their code or deploy chef code locally. It's a small, fast, and in-memory implementation of the Chef server and it helps developers to write a clean code without all the hooks that were earlier placed into the code to ensure that chef-solo can execute the code.

With the understanding of the Chef ecosystem, we will be covering the following topics in this chapter:

  • Different modes of running Chef
  • Terminology used in the world of Chef
  • The anatomy of a Chef run
  • Using the Chef Solo provisioner
  • Setting up a work environment
You have been reading a chapter from
Mastering Chef
Published in: Jun 2015
Publisher:
ISBN-13: 9781783981564
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