DevOps tools: The beginner’s guide to Chef

Sohail is an SRE, professionally experienced in IaaS, cloud computing, automation, and deployment. He is a python enthusiast and best-seller at Fiverr known for his result-driven deliverables and satisfactory customer service. When he is not actively involved in all these, he reads and explores new things. Terraform is one of the most demanding DevOps certification courses. Flexibility and seamless integration with cloud service providers to manage infrastructure makes Terraform outperform its competitors.

The Workstation is where you create and test your code before you deploy it to other environments. Your workstation is the computer where you author your cookbooks and administer your infrastructure. https://remotemode.net/blog/15-highest-paying-remote-jobs-you-can-get/ It can be any OS you choose, whether it’s Linux, macOS, or Windows. You’ll need to install a text editor (whichever you like) to write code and ChefDK to get the tools to test your code.

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The host workstation is where we placed the cookbook while the node1 serves as the Chef Server. Let’s proceed and continue on bootstrapping and running the cookbook in the node9 client. Take note that you need to apply the same /etc/hosts to your workstation, Chef Server, as well as the client unless you are using a DNS. Chef requires that all the nodes are able to resolve the network connectivity and establish a connection to each other. The Chef Infra Client has to be run periodically, for which chef-client command can be daemonized with the -d option. This iterative process ensures that the network as a whole converges to the state envisioned by business policy.

But, before diving deep into “What is Chef”, it’s only fair that I first explain what is Configuration Management and why it is important. Chef is a tool used for Configuration Management and is closely competing with Puppet. In this blog, I will explain What is Chef, Configuration Management and how Chef achieves Configuration Management with a use-case. Chef also offers tools such as Chef Analytics, Chef Backend, Chef Compliance and Chef Manage.

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One of the best features of Chef Automate is its integration flexibility. You can integrate Chef Automate with any cloud service provider. Chef Automate comes with a command-line tool called Knife, which makes all integrations smooth as silk.

World-leading IT companies like Facebook, AWS, HP Public cloud, etc., use Chef to streamline their DevOps processes. One of the traditional deployment workflows is Gannett, which was characterized by various handoffs and manual tests. See what were the problems they faced with this process, the problem are. Rishabh Verma is Google Certified Professional DevOps Engineer. He loves to take deep dives into cloud technologies & different tools. The client will then check in every now and again to make sure that no changes have occurred, and nothing needs to change.

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Similarly, a Chef workstations can download cookbooks found in the Supermarket. Any changes made to your infrastructure code must pass through the Chef server to be applied to nodes. Prior to accepting or pushing changes, the Chef server authenticates all communication via its REST API using public key encryption. It was easier to handle chef certification devops peaky traffic because of cloud’s compute-on-demand model, and handoffs were minimized. Puppet provides a standard way of delivering and operating software, no matter where it runs. It is an automated administrative engine for Linux, Unix, and Windows system that performs administrative tasks based on centralized specification.

• It has many features, including those that can help define, pack, and deliver applications.
• The workstation sends the cookbook to the server using a knife.
• The cookbooks are kept on the second component, the server, which acts as a go-between between the workstation and the nodes.
• If your company’s decision-makers have narrowed down the potential products to these two, set aside enough time to go through the setup process slowly and remain patient.
• These resources explain a certain pieces of infrastructure like a file, a template or a package to be installed.
• See Chef’s official documentation for more in-depth information on Chef Workstation and its tools.

The server will next compare this data to the configuration files and determine whether any new setup is necessary. The Chef server used to store configuration data and administer access rights. We will also install a workstation that will allow us to interact with our server and build our configuration policies. This is where we will do the work to manage our infrastructure environment.

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Templates are embedded Ruby files (.erb) used to dynamically create static text files. To use a template within a Chef cookbook, a template resource must be declared in a recipe and include a corresponding .erb file in a template subdirectory. Your template resource can contain variables used by the template to dynamically provide those values based on a node’s particular context. Although Chef comes with libraries built-in, additional libraries can be defined. Libraries allow you to write Ruby code to include in a cookbook. Libraries are a convenient way to include helper code for your existing recipes.