Cooking Up Infrastructure with Chef
Chef is a community-developed platform for automated provisioning, configuration, and integration of software infrastructure. It currently boasts 190+ individuals and 40+ companies (including parent company OpsCode) as contributors, and companies like EngineYard, ElectronicArts, GoTime, and Rhapsody as adopters.
Chef achieves fully automated infrastructure via three primary disciplines:
- Automated provisioning of bare metal, virtualized, and cloud environments
- Configuration of servers via roles ("webserver", "appserver", "loadbalancer") and recipes, which are declarative descriptions of resource (e.g. Apache, MySQL, Hadoop) configurations written in a Ruby DSL
- Systems integration via dynamic lookup and discovery
We'll dive deeply into Chef's architecture and features, including its idempotency, its thick client/thin server philosophy, its intentional lack of dependency management (preferring and order-based configuration), and its deep integration with other tools. We'll then leverage Chef to set up infrastructure of a typical JVM-based web development project with various OS, application server and datastore configurations. You'll leave a ready to get cooking with Chef on your next software delivery effort.
About Matt Stine
Matt Stine is an Enterprise Java/Cloud consultant based in Memphis, TN. He is a twelve year veteran of the enterprise software and web development industries, with experience spanning the healthcare, biomedical research, e-commerce, and retail store domains.
Matt has spoken at conferences ranging from JavaOne to CodeMash and has published several articles for Agile Zone, GroovyMag and NFJS the Magazine, as well as the Selenium 2.0 DZone Refcard. Matt is also the founder of the Memphis/Mid-South Java User Group.
His current areas of interest include lean/agile software development, software architecture, mobile application development and functional languages.
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