1783982462 {c12012f7} configuration management with chef solo ur rahman 2014 07 15

Chef-Solo is an open source version of chef-client originally developed by Chef Software,Inc.. Chapter 1 , Introduction to Chef and Chef-Solo, explains about Chef, chef-client, and Chef-

Solo

Installing Chef as a package managerUsing the Omnibus installer

System virtual machines

Process virtual machines

Executing recipes with Vagrant

Provision

Data bags

Roles

Restarting services and server handlingSummary

Web UI

Erchef

Message queues

Summary

Index

Solo

dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be causeddirectly or indirectly by this book.

Shantanu Zagade

Naveed ur Rahman is a self-taught programmer and an avid traveler When he is not

experimenting with the latest in programming and deployment, he is out camping andwatching cricket

BASIC Now, he has experience working for one of the biggest tech names in the MiddleEast

His adventures in programming began at a very young age when he got introduced to GW-Having worked at the largest technology company in the Middle East, Naveed has helpedteams create and deploy applications written in various languages using configurationmanagement tools

I would like to thank my family for supporting me throughout the process of writing Also,the help of Packt Publishing staff has been incredible I would like to thank my projectcoordinator and content development editor who supported me in writing and finalizingthe content Also, the technical reviewers provided me with a clear guideline to make thisbook more effective Moreover, their valuable critiques allowed me to refine my work

Anirudh Bhatnagar is a technology consultant with an extensive experience in Agile

product development and consulting He started his career working as a Java developerwith product-based companies such as Adobe Systems, India, where most of his

experience was in Java, J2EE, Spring, Hibernate, XML, Web Services, REST, CMS, SSO,ESB, and Liferay Currently, he is working as a Principal Consultant in Xebia, India withspecialization in Continuous Delivery methodology, and working on developing a PaaSfor service orchestration using Mule ESB, ActiveMQ, Elasticsearch, Jenkins, Maven,Chef, and AWS He has been contributing to the software community through his blogs,articles, projects, meetups, and conferences Recently, he has started a DevOps community

in New Delhi and has spoken at DevOpsDays India 2013

Stuart Ellis works for a Ruby on Rails and mobile software development company, where

he has many hats In his current and previous roles, he has developed software with NETand Ruby, written SQL in a surprising number of dialects, managed different combinations

of Windows and Linux, and studied history

Jorge Moratilla has a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and has been working for

Internet companies since 1998 He has been working as a contractor for companies such asSun Microsystems and Oracle, working as a certified instructor and field engineer forseveral years He has a large background working with technologies and products such asLinux, Solaris, LDAP, and Check Point Recently, he has been working in developmentcompanies, mainly as a system administrator, and performing several tasks related withAgile management, testing, and Continuous Deployment As a coordinator of the technicalgroup Madrid DevOps, he promotes the adoption of a culture of continuous improvement

in the enterprise You can meet him at talks and hangouts he organizes in the community

I would like to personally thank my wife Nuria and son Eduardo for being so

understanding and supportive while I was reviewing this book Also, I would like to thank

my dear mom Milagros and dad Toñi, who put in all the effort to give me an education.Finally, I would thank also all those who have contributed to my personal and professionaldevelopment through the years

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Chef-Solo is an open source version of chef-client originally developed by Chef Software,Inc It is a complete framework to automate infrastructure operations for building servers

or applications from scratch or adding new configurations to existing systems These

servers are managed by code written in Ruby and it also provides the facility to test andreproduce

The book will take the reader through the workflow of managing one or more servers.Also, it includes many sample recipes to help you get started

Throughout the process, we will have a look at the different interaction points and you willlearn how Chef-Solo helps to minimize your efforts to build and efficiently manage

Chapter 1

, Introduction to Chef and Chef-Solo, explains about Chef, chef-client, and Chef-Solo It explains about the core concepts in Chef and the terminologies with some usecases

Chapter 2, Setting Up an Environment for Chef-Solo, guides you to install Chef-Solo on

your Ubuntu machine, and discusses cookbooks and their structure in detail It also

provides step-by-step instructions on how to run cookbooks using Chef-Solo with customconfigurations

Chapter 3, Setting Up a Development Environment, explains virtual machines and their

providers In this chapter, we will set up the development environment using Vagrant andexecute some sample recipes

Chapter 4, Developing Cookbooks, looks deeper into developing recipes and how to

manage the recipes in cookbooks It also provides more detailed information on metadata,attributes, templates, files, resources, and data bags Also, it includes some tools to

manage and create cookbooks, for example, Knife and Berkshelf

Chapter 5, More about Cookbooks and Recipes, continues with the last chapter’s

cookbooks and manages the remaining contents with files and templates This chapterincludes Python/Django cookbooks and information about upstream service

Chapter 6, Chef-Solo and Docker, covers the installation of Docker and creation of Docker

images using Chef-Solo Also, this chapter includes some recommendations on how towork on recipes of ongoing projects and keep them aligned with Chef-Solo

You need only a single Ubuntu machine to get started This book contains a step-by-stepguide to set up a development environment Once you have successfully installed

everything, you can easily reproduce the same on multiple machines

This book is for system administrators and system engineers who have an understanding

of configuration management tools and infrastructure It helps you to understand the needfor these tools and provides you with a step-by-step guide to maintain your existing

infrastructure It also contains the most frequently used application recipes to get startedimmediately

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between differentkinds of information Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of theirmeaning

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Solo

Chapter 1 Introduction to Chef and Chef-Chef is a configuration management system to automate the process of deploying servers

to any physical, virtual, or cloud location Each setup involves the basic structure with oneChef server and different nodes managed by the chef-client Chef infrastructure is

managed by Ruby code and it allows you to test, build, and replicate your infrastructure.This chapter will guide you through the basics of Chef and how it can help you in building

Chef is a complete framework to automate infrastructure operations to build servers orapplications from scratch or add new configurations to existing systems Servers are

For instance, if you want 100 servers with Python/Django running Nginx with uWSGI andyou want to have the same installations on each node, Chef can make this happen in

minutes; it also provides you with the switch to turn your nodes on and off It can checkfor revision control system and is responsible for pulling recent updates from the

repository You can easily revert the system to the previous state if something does nothappen according to your needs With Chef, system administrators can spend less time onmaintenance and more time on innovation

Traditional infrastructure is slow and tedious; it involves many steps to build servers andrunning applications All your configurations are in one place and you will not worryabout the several configurations of different servers While scaling your application, it ishighly recommended to use Chef, as you can easily split your app on to different servers

by using roles and nodes You do not have to install the same application 10 times on onemachine or any other, just create a new node in Chef server and in a few minutes, theserver will be ready to handle the application Also, there is no need to maintain the

documentation of servers, as the recipes’ code is self-explanatory and easy to grasp for anew user

Chef is developed by Chef Software, Inc and recently they released Version 11.0 Chefcode is completely rewritten in Version 11.0, swapping out Apache CouchDB for

PostgreSQL and Ruby for Erlang The result is massive and now a single Chef server canhandle more than 1000 nodes (clients)

Chef is provided in the following three versions:

Private Chef: This is an enterprise version that supports multi-tenancy to provide a

highly scalable server to handle several nodes It should be located in the client’spremises and managed behind a firewall

Hosted Chef: This is an SAAS service managed by Chef Software, Inc It is a cloud-based service and highly available (24/7 x 365), with roles and resource-based accesscontrols It does not require a firewall

Open source Chef: This is a community-driven version with almost identical

updates, defining roles, data migrations, and ensuring that the infrastructure scalesappropriately

approach ensures that each node has persistent data and files

Knife: Knife is a tool that provides an interface between local-repo and the server It

is used to retrieve cookbooks, policies, roles, environments, and other items

Chef-Solo is an open source version of chef-client It executes recipes from the local

cookbooks It is a limited version of chef-client and has much fewer features than it Itdoes not have the following features:

Similarly, you can search by instance type, node, environment, nested attributes, andmultiple arguments

Centralized distribution of cookbooks: As Chef-Solo works individually, it does

not have the ability for distribution of cookbooks Even if you have deployed Chefserver, Chef-Solo will not be able to retrieve recipes from a centralized source

Centralized API for integration with other infrastructure components: There is

no centralized API for Chef-Solo to retrieve other configurations from a differentmachine For instance, if your application needs database connectivity, you will not

be able to get the IP of the database source There are multiple solutions to addressthis problem, which we will discuss in the upcoming chapters

Authentication: Chef-Solo has no authentication module; anyone can execute the

recipes:

# chef-solo privileges

test ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/chef-solo

Persistent attributes: There is no centralized cookbook system for Chef-Solo; it just

executes the recipes from a local cookbook

Although Chef-Solo has fewer features, it provides the core use of developing cookbooks.Moreover, Chef-Solo provides a simple way to start You can build the system by usingcookbooks and it’s extremely useful for booting new machines

Like chef-client, Chef-Solo can be used for servers, applications, or any physical machine

We will now discuss some terminologies about Chef As we have already discussed, Chefhas two different types, namely Chef server and Chef-Solo Chef-Solo provides a simpleway to start The following terminologies mentioned are used for Chef server as well asChef-Solo