Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Open
Chef is open source and supported by a vibrant community of system administrators and
developers. Chef open source has been used to power
products from Dell
,
from Face-
book
,
and
from Amazon Web Services
.
Visible
As a premium feature, the Chef Analytics Platform provides powerful enhancements to
Chef integrated with the tool, so that you can be notified when important changes are
made as a way to enforce compliance.
Chef's unique approach gives you tremendous flexibility. You don't need to struggle to con-
form to Chef. Chef adapts to you and your environment. You can deploy to the cloud or local
infrastructure. You can describe any resource you have in code no matter how much it differs
from a standard configuration.
With Chef there is no reason to start from scratch; many standard infrastructure configura-
tions and tasks are already described in Chef cookbooks are available for free on the
Chef
Supermarket
site.
Once you master Chef, you can use it to
▪ Fully automate deployments, including internal development and end-user systems
▪ Automate scaling of infrastructure
▪ Make your infrastructure self-healing
As an example, Tom Hallet used Chef to create a tool called SoloWizard, which he uses to
automate deployments of his Mac OS X development machines. SoloWizard is based on the
work Pivotal Labs has done to promote the use of automation for developer and end-user
systems. As you can see from
Figure 1-2
, SoloWizard lets you create a new development en-
vironment with a single command. You can even personalize the output script to meet your
needs by making choices on a simple website. This tool is publicly available at
the SoloWiz-
