Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
When servers can be reproduced easily in a repeatable fashion, fewer processes are
needed to manage change. Small change batches can be performed on a regular basis,
such as daily, or even several times a day.
Simplicity in rebuild. When servers are built manually, it's typically not easy to rebuild
them from scratch. What would happen if you suddenly lost your servers in a catastroph-
ic event? How quickly could you restore service if disaster struck?
Automated deployments using a configuration management tool help quickly restore ser-
vice. Rather than bothering to upgrade or patch applications, which can be inherently fra-
gile operations, system administrators can build a new, upgraded system in an automated
fashion and throw the old one away, returning it to the server pool. When rebuilds are
easy, system administrators gain confidence to make changes to infrastructure more rap-
idly.
Visibility. Configuration management tools include auditing and reporting capabilities.
Monitoring the work performed by one system administrator doesn't require a sophistic-
ated tool. But trying to understand what is going on with a team of, say, 10 system ad-
ministrators and 10 software developers deploying software changes many times per
day? You need a configuration tool.
When infrastructure changes are handled by automated systems, changes can be automat-
ically logged in all relevant tracking systems to raise visibility on the meaningful work
your teams are doing.
What Is Chef?
Chef is an automation platform that configures and manages your infrastructure whether it is
on-premises or in the cloud. You can deploy to the infrastructure type that makes the most
sense for your business. You can use Chef to speed up application deployment, even creating
a continual deployment pipeline. The key to Chef's power is that it turns infrastructure into
code.
Infrastructure as code means that your computing environment has some of the same attrib-
utes as your application:
▪ Your infrastructure is versionable.
▪ Your infrastructure is repeatable.
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