As a chef employee, i found it incredibly reassuring to hear that the daily challenge of automating complex software systems is a shared problem. When configuration is code, devops teams work more efficiently, enabling continuous automation across all it processes. Chef training and certification chef software, inc. Configuration management introducing chef cloud academy. Cookbooks group recipes together for easier management and they contain all the required states, services, packages and files to be written for. It gives you freedom to use the standard language features for maximum flexibility, while also offering custom dsls for some resources. Chef provides a ruby library and api that can be used to bring the benefits of configuration management to an. Chef is the leader in continuous automation software, and one of the founders of the devops movement. Many companies use chef software to control and manage their. These recipes contain resources that should be put into the declared state. Configuration management cm is the set of practices aiming to manage the runtime state of the applications.
Devops brought them together and thereby came the need for integrated configuration management and continuous integration. By definition, configuration management tools all enable users to configure the options needed for deployment and operations. Puppet, ansible, saltstack, chef why configuration management. As a configuration management tool, chef creates recipes that contain the infrastructure definitions required to provision resources on servers that host the applications and utilities a company uses. The combined knowledge and performance assessment approach provides the opportunity to demonstrate chef proficiency in real world scenarios. Chef infra client is installed on each node that is managed with chef infra. Chef is a configuration management system designed to allow you to automate and control vast numbers of computers in an automated, reliable, and scalable manner. This is related to the older workload automation category of software. Chef being a configuration management tool, achieves all of the above mentioned things, both in a physical data centre and in public cloud by taking the same software development approach of managing things using. This is the 1st chapter of our chef self paced video training. This tutorial will walk you through the process of automating server provisioning using chef, a powerful configuration management tool that leverages the ruby programming language to automate infrastructure administration and provisioning. Top 10 configuration management tools you need to know about. Chef transforms infrastructure into code to automate server deployment and management. Chef infra client will also pull down any required configuration data from the chef infra server during a chef infra client run.
Its meant to help anyone orchestrate servers in a cloud or just in a departmental data center. Chef is a configuration management technology, developed on the basis of ruby dsl language and is used to automate the infrastructure provisioning. The badgebased chef certification program provides the opportunity to demonstrate your capabilities and communicate your credentials wherever and whenever you choose. Configuration management is an increasingly important foundation for a successful tech platform. Companies audit their various endpoints for compliance against cis or disa standards using chef inspec, while viewing the aggregate compliance state of. Introduction to configuration management skill me up. Today chef announces compliance waiver support within chef inspec and chef automate. Sep 12, 2019 configuration management is an increasingly important foundation for a successful tech platform. Why configuration management and provisioning are different.
The goal of scm is to improve the speed of and quality by catching errors early and enabling quick fixes when they occur. Instead of system administrators sweating over management programs that were designed for single, standalone servers, chef allows devops to spin off dozens or hundreds. Chef is a configuration management tool for dealing with machine setup on physical servers, virtual machines and in the cloud. Chef is an open source systems management and cloud infrastructure automation platform. Chef is the configuration management tool and an automation platform for installing, configuring and managing vmware infrastructure. What this means is you can manage these infrastructure components in the cloud using the same configuration management utilities.
When chef infra client runs, it will bring the node into the expected state and prevent configuration drift. Let us understand configuration management this way suppose you have to deploy a software on top of hundreds of systems. Oct 07, 2015 chef is a configuration management tool for dealing with machine setup on physical servers, virtual machines and in the cloud. For example, if you tell chef to install a new version of openssl, itll run the software update on your existing servers and the changes will happen inplace. Mar 18, 2020 today chef announces compliance waiver support within chef inspec and chef automate. The chef infra server acts as a hub for configuration data. Apart from chef, tools supporting cloud environments are puppet, ansible, salt. The chef effortless infrastructure suite offers visibility into security and compliance status across all infrastructure and makes it easy to detect and correct issues long before they reach production. Opscode created the chef configuration management tool, and the company later changed its name to chef.
Comparison of opensource configuration management software. Configuration management watch more videos at lecture by. Chef also provide the template infrastructure to configure the module according to the enterprise and devops standard. What configuration management is and where it originated from. Configuration management standardize, enforce, and track the configuration of resources like databases and web servers throughout your it infrastructure. How to create simple chef cookbooks to manage infrastructure. Software configuration management scm is the management of a software project as it becomes a software product or system. May 09, 2018 configuration management watch more videos at lecture by. It is a flexible cloud infrastructure automation framework that allows the users to install the. Chef is an automation tool that provides a way to define infrastructure as code.
It uses a pureruby, domainspecific language for writing system configuration recipes. It is written in ruby, a reflective objectoriented programming language. The ability to automatically deploy software and virtual infrastructure, in a policy driven approach with defined configuration is a key attribute. Chef is an open source systems integration framework and configuration management system. Ideal for developers and sysadmins new to configuration management, this guide shows you to automate the packaging and delivery of applications in your infrastructure. Software configuration management tools, such as chef and puppet, can be used in concert with versioncontrol tools for source code management, such as apache subversion and git. This course provides an overview of what chef configuration management is, and how you can use it to optimize your server automated configuration process. Chef has become one of the widely used tools for configuration management. Chef works with more than a thousand of the most innovative companies around the world to. In previous tutorials, we have looked at some common chef terminology and discussed how to install a chef server, workstation, and nodes with chef 12 or chef 11. It uses a pureruby, domainspecific language dsl for. In this blog, i will explain what is chef, configuration management and how chef achieves configuration management with a usecase.
Chef training delivered when and where you need it, exclusively for your team, virtually or at your location. Overview of chef what is desired state configuration management. The scm practices include vision controls in the establishment. Configuration management and chef learning chef book. Chef is an opensource systems management and cloud infrastructure automation framework created by opscode. Understand how to define scm and discuss how to accomplish it. A node is any devicephysical, virtual, cloud, network device, etc. Using chef for compliance provides a holistic solution for enterprises to achieve continuous compliance. Why we use terraform and not chef, puppet, ansible, saltstack. Chef is a configuration management tool written in erlang, and uses a pure ruby dsl for writing configuration recipes. The following is a tale of two heavyweights in the cm arena. Jan 25, 2018 software configuration management scm is a set of processes, policies, and tools that organize the development process.
Chef is a company and the name of a configuration management tool written in ruby and erlang. Chef is a powerful configuration management tool that leverages the ruby language to automate server provisioning and deployment. Chef is a configuration management tool for dealing with machine setup on. Chef infra client configures the node locally by performing the tasks specified in the runlist. The conference is laser focused on the problem set of configuration management, yet vendor neutral, which makes for wonderful conversations across different tool communities. Get a handson introduction to the chef, the configuration management tool for solving operations issues in enterprises large and small. This process encompasses the technical aspects, communication between business units, the overall organization of the project, and any changes to the project plan. The scm practices include vision controls in the establishment of baselines. Chef blog it automation for everything from configuration. Software configuration management scm is a set of processes, policies, and tools that organize the development process. Chef automated configuration management linuxlinks. Configuration management tools such as chef, puppet, ansible, and saltstack typically default to a mutable infrastructure paradigm.
Chef automate leverages chef, habitat, and inspec to create a pipeline that can cross both internal and external boundaries, standardizing environments and processes locally within the data center and up. Chef software is an open source configuration management tool that you can use to create parts of an infrastructure as a service iaas. Workload automation is still used by many organizations to handle eventbased scheduling and resource management across applications, databases, and. Chef is a powerful configuration management tool that manages and helps in automating the infrastructure with the advance software methodology. It can be used to automate the entire stack including provisioning and deprovisioning vms, templates and networks.
Starting from an introduction to chef software, you will learn about the chef architecture, how to author recipes and cookbooks, and applying tho. Over time, as you apply more and more updates, each. But even a big fish like chef is still a minnow compared to the whale that is sccm, which runs on about twothirds of enterprise organizations. Managing multiple virtual machines requires proper configurationloading them with the right software and making sure that software can run.
In addition, access to nodes, data bags, roles, environments, and cookbooks is configurable using rolebased access control rbac. Chef vs puppet a detailed comparison of the configuration. Chef infra client will also pull down any required configuration data from the chef infra server during a. Enabling the coded enterprise through infrastructure. Chef is a configuration management tool for information technology it professionals, like you. In software engineering software configuration management is the task of tracking and controlling changes in the software part of the larger disciplinary field of configuration management. Microsofts systems center configuration manager sccm and chef. The only way to turn configuration management into a competitive advantage instead of disruptive churn is to keep environments consistent. Chef is used to streamline the task of configuring and maintaining a companys servers, and can integrate with cloudbased platforms such as internap. Apr 07, 2014 chef has become one of the widely used tools for configuration management. It is a flexible cloud infrastructure automation framework that allows the users to install the apps to bare metal vms and cloud containers. The chef management console enables the management of nodes, data bags, roles, environments, and cookbooks by using a web user interface. The present and future of configuration management nordic apis. Good leaders in the tech space will want to know what it takes to implement it.
Relying on disparate tracking systems such as the knowledge of individual developers or it leads can mean that important planning, design, build details, dependencies, and milestones get lost. Chef is a tool used for configuration management and is closely competing with puppet. Apply to python developer, database administrator, senior administrative specialist and more. Aws opsworks is an application management service that makes it easy for devops to model and manage the entire application from load balancers to databases. All about a configuration management tool called chef. Because configuration management tools, like chef or puppet, are designed to modify existing infrastructure, not to keep a history of past configurations, in order to add an additional database server, you would need to write code to calculate the state of your current environment before taking any action against it. Every application consists of one or more databases, web servers, application servers, reverse proxies, load balancers, and other moving parts that need to work together at runtime to make a working system. What is configuration management and how does it work. Chef infra client is an agent that runs locally on every node that is under management by chef infra. Because there are a wide variety of definitions for the term configuration management, lets take a moment to explain what configuration management means in the context of this book and why you need a configuration management tool.
In this way, software configuration management intersects with broader configuration management, occupying cis such as physical servers and os instances. Chef is an open source cloud configuration management and deployment application. It uses a pureruby, domainspecific language dsl for writing system configuration recipes. Configuration management software is designed to automate the deployment of applications in the data center and in the cloud. Chef software sales and support the devops experts. Read the modernizing legacy applications for the digital age whitepaper. The list of the most popular software configuration management tools top scm tools in 2020 in software engineering software configuration management is the task of tracking and controlling changes in the software part of the larger disciplinary field of configuration management. Sep 26, 2016 configuration management tools such as chef, puppet, ansible, and saltstack typically default to a mutable infrastructure paradigm.
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