Automation, Provisioning & Configuration Management CHEF

Ohai fetches the current state of the node it is located in. These nodes communicate with the chef server using chef client. Each node can have a different configuration required but a chef client is installed on every node. It is a tool that runs on every chef node to pull code from chef server.

• Hence you don’t have to be managing your environment on a hardware basis but actually use scripts called recipes that will automate things for you.
• Consider Terraform automation if you prefer to utilize a tool for efficient and reliable deployment.
• Chef is ranked 13th in Release Automation with 2 reviews while Microsoft Azure DevOps is ranked 1st in Release Automation with 67 reviews.
• Due to its automation and configuration capabilities, Chef DevOps is also renowned as a Server Configuration and Automation tool.
• Its flagship enterprise solution, Chef, is a strong choice for experienced DevOps teams who want to automate their development and deployment infrastructure.
• Working with the Chef automation tool, you can create, destroy, and rebuild servers on your preferred cloud platform.

Most recipes are simple patterns or blocks that define properties and values that map to specific configuration items like packages, files, services, templates, and users. Chef is a popular tool for configuration management of IT infrastructure. Its flagship enterprise solution, Chef, is a strong choice for experienced DevOps teams who want to automate their development and deployment infrastructure. Configuration management is essential for any DevOps project. Whether you need to automate, design, or manage configurations manually, a configuration management tool plays a critical role in your DevOps project.

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Like Chef, Puppet is an open source configuration management platform based on Ruby. Puppet released the initial version of its software in 2005, while Opscode unveiled Chef in 2009. Salt and Ansible joined the field in 2011 and 2012, respectively. An administrator can define operational processes with the policy feature in the Chef Server. The admin can use policy to define server types, identify environment stages, map data types and specify cookbook details. InSpec also provides a way for IT organizations to discover what is currently deployed and how, which helps security professionals ensure that deployments comply with regulations.

• Google Cloud lets you use startup scripts when booting VMs to improve security and reliability.
• Chef transforms infrastructure into code to automate server deployment and management.
• It consists of recipes for specifying the usable resources and the order in which they should be implemented.
• But it starts getting difficult if more than one machine fails at the same time and being a single person you are not able to fix all the systems as quickly as possible.
• This problem could have been sorted if the environments of different systems would have been in sync.

The Finance wanted to know the true value of an application and the security wanted to view and audit all stacks that were able to track changes. These applications were deployed to all environments in the same way that they were deployed to production. Also, testing occurred in each environment, so that the deployments were reliable. Gannett started building VPC for development environment that would mimic the production. None of the tools that they were already using were appropriate. But they found that Chef worked well with the cloud and both Linux and Windows environment.

History of Chef

Many organizations struggle to manage their vast collection of AWS accounts, but Control Tower can help. AWS Compute Optimizer and Cost Explorer monitor, analyze and optimize your cloud costs. A business can also run the open source version of Chef, a free download that an IT staff configures and manages locally. Ensure configurations are applied consistently in every environment.

They used Chef to build a development environment that perfectly matched production environment. Chef allows you to dynamically provision and de-provision your infrastructure on demand to keep up with peaks in usage and traffic. It enables new services and features to be deployed and updated more frequently, with little risk of downtime. With Chef, you can take advantage chef certification devops of all the flexibility and cost savings that cloud offers. Agent-based configuration management pulls information from a central repository, Chef Server, in a model that overcomes poor network connectivity and enables flexible update rollouts. Chef is an agent-based tool wherein chef-client pulls the configuration information for the managed node from Chef Server.

Chef vs. Puppet, Ansible and Salt

Imagine, after 1 week the new project demands to update the 250 servers from Windows to Linux. It is exceptional that a single individual is familiar about each and every complex problem and its essential solutions. Chef provides you with a framework which helps in evading these worn-tools problems.

Our developers are fully versed in Chef DevOps, the best practices platform into which Chef is fully integrated. We are able to deliver easily tested software and infrastructure changes which are fully traceable thanks to Chef Delivery. Jira’s secret sauce is the way it simplifies the complexities of software development into manageable units of work. Jira comes out-of-the-box with everything agile teams need to ship value to customers faster. Rishabh Verma is Google Certified Professional DevOps Engineer.

Since we have a cookbook for automating the installation of PostgreSQL 11 in CentOS. Let’s consider a scenario – what if the pg_hba.conf file has been updated by someone without following the runbooks or policy your company wants to impose. 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.