Companies looking at DevOps with the hopes of streamlining their software development process sometimes struggle with the initial implementation. Leveraging the right set of DevOps tools is an important factor in achieving success as much as any organizational or policy-based changes. One such tool – known as Chef – is especially helpful for shops taking advantage of the Cloud as part of their overall application engineering strategy.
What follows is a closer look at the features and functionality of Chef to see if it allows your team to manage server infrastructure quicker than ever before.
Open Source Server Configuration Management for the Cloud… and more
Chef’s main functionality centers on the management of Cloud-based infrastructure. It offers value to any company whether they manage ten servers or ten thousand – no matter the platform. It lets your development staff focus on ensuring their software runs properly, instead of having to deal with the drudgery of server administration tasks. While it truly shines in the Cloud, Chef also works with on-premise servers as well as a hybrid infrastructure.
A Code-based Approach to Server Management
What makes Chef unique among similar infrastructure management tools is its emphasis on using code to define and automate a collection of servers. This lets you handle automated server management in a similar fashion as your applications, with development, QA, and production environments ensuring a high level of quality. Additionally, letting your developers manage servers using code fits nicely with the overall philosophy of DevOps, where formerly segregated duties are handled in a more communal fashion.
A development kit, known as the Chef DK, includes everything required to develop and test infrastructure automation code. Test Kitchen handles the running of these tests, using InSpec as the TDD programming language. Not surprisingly, the included code analysis tool is known as the “Food Critic.”
Continuing with this kitchen metaphor, the collection of code used to automate and define a server infrastructure is known as a cookbook, and – of course – they are made up of recipes. This nomenclature definitely helps developers new to Chef better understand the functionality of each part of the system. Behind this somewhat humorous style lies a very powerful tool.
The Chef Server is the central repository for every cookbook in the system. This design allows the Server to manage any number of physical or virtual machines in your infrastructure. The Chef Client runs on each of these nodes; staying in constant communication with the Server.
An Essential Tool for DevOps
As noted earlier, Chef offers any DevOps organization the means to manage their technical infrastructure easier than before. Its code-based scheme for server management lets you leverage your development talent in a new fashion. The kitchen-based metaphor used in Chef also makes it easy to understand by both your technical and non-technical team members.
Chef, and similar tools, like Ansible which we previously covered, play an important role in any company deriving value from its investment in DevOps. Ultimately, this is a methodology requiring more than just a change in organizational structure for success. Download Chef to see if it makes sense in your shop.
Thanks for reading the Betica Blog. Keep coming back for additional insights from the software development world.