How I’m Learning Chef Configuration Management

I'm a DevOps and SDET Engineer based in the Colorado mountains.

How is it useful for DevOps?

Configuration management tools are useful in DevOps because they allow for quick fixes and configuration changes for servers. Rather than updating tens or hundreds of servers with a few lines of code, Chef allows you to write code once and deploy to as many servers as you need. This is a critical point for efficient continuous deployment.

How does Chef work?

Chef is set up with 3 different points of architecture. There’s the Workstation, the Server, and the Nodes. Each one plays a specific role in how your whole system gets the configurations it needs to keep deployments continuous.

But before we dive into the architecture, it’s important to understand the file structure of Chef. Chef at its core is written in Ruby and Erlang, but all the configurations you will end up writing will be in Ruby. These configuration files are called recipes. A collection of recipes is called a cookbook.

Now, back to the architecture.

The Workstation is your computer or the computer you might have remote access/ssh access to. This is the place where the recipes and cookbooks are updated and deployed with Chef’s CLI tool knife. Knife pushes your changes to the Server.

The Server is responsible for holding the source of truth for all the Nodes. So it contains the finished recipes and cookbooks that you have deployed to it. It won't contain any new changes or updates until you deploy those from your Workstation to the Server.

The Nodes are the individual servers that are running your services or applications. These Nodes use a tool called OHAI to check their state against the Server. If there is a difference in the state between the Nodes and the Server, chef-client is used to update the Nodes with whatever changes are needed from the Server. Oftentimes chef-client is set up with cron to run at a certain time every day or at certain time intervals, like every 30 minutes.

How I’m Learning Chef Configuration Management

Comments

More from this blog

10 Intro EC2 Concepts DevOps Needs To Know

Intro to AWS & Cloud Computing

Top 5 Vim Commands To Increase Efficiency

Top 10 Mixes I Discovered in 2022

What is Chef?

How is it useful for DevOps?

How does Chef work?

How am I learning Chef?

Additional Resources

Command Palette

Comments

More from this blog

What is Chef?

How is it useful for DevOps?

How does Chef work?

How am I learning Chef?

Additional Resources