Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Success criteria
Once you have a goal, you need to have some way to determine that you have achieved
the goal. Success criteria describe the things we need to evaluate about the cookbook to
determine that it meets its intended purpose. The following is an example of success cri-
teria for the mysql cookbook:
Do just enough to get MySQL running and expose a way to create MySQL users, data-
bases, and tables.
App/service
Each cookbook should manage a single application or service (a unit of your infrastruc-
ture). You should identify that application or service before creating the cookbook. If you
are unable to identify a single application or service, you should consider narrowing the
vision from the previous step. For example, our narrowed “App/Service” would be
“MySQL.”
Required steps
If you don't know the required steps to accomplish your goal, it's going to be difficult to
automate the process with a cookbook. Automation first requires a grasp of what steps
are needed to install and configure the application manually (along with any prerequis-
ites), then you can start tackling the process of making the installation repeatable without
human intervention via automation.
In this section, we will create and author a cookbook named “apache” to configure our web
server.
Table 7-2
is the completed table for our “apache” cookbook.
