Using Chef With Microsoft Azure

Using Chef with Microsoft Azure is your hands-on guide to infrastructure provisioning and configuration management in the cloud using Chef’s open source, cross-platform toolset. With over 10,000 customers joining the Microsoft Azure cloud platform each week and steadily increasing usage, the need for automation approaches has never been greater. This book provides both practical examples and a much needed strategic overview of how these two technologies can be combined.

This book takes you through the process of writing ‘recipes’ in Chef to describe your infrastructure and application dependencies, and simplify your configuration management processes. You’ll also meet the Chef tools that can be executed from the command line to provision complete environments within Microsoft Azure.

There are now a wide variety of tools and approaches that can be taken to provision resources, virtual machines and their dependencies within Microsoft Azure. This book demonstrates them, discusses the benefits and weaknesses of each approach and shows how a continuous provisioning pipeline can be established as part of a reliable, repeatable and robust provisioning process.

Each chapter has practical exercises highlight the capabilities of both Chef and Microsoft Azure from an automation perspective and can be executed on Windows, Mac or Linux platforms.

What You'll Learn

• The purpose and principles behind automated provisioning, and why Chef could be the right tool for you
  
• Microsoft Azure concepts and management options
  
• How to install a Chef 12 server from the Azure Marketplace
  
• How to provision machines, using both Knife Azure and Chef Provisioning, including examples using Ubuntu and Windows
  
• How to deploy Chef Azure Virtual Machine Extensions using PowerShell, Knife Azure, and Chef Provisioning
  
• Advanced Chef Provisioning techniques, including provisioning many machines in batch mode, provisioning PaaS resources, and provisioning a multi-tier application
  
• How to integrate quality tooling into the Chef development lifecyc

le, including ChefSpec, Test Kitchen, and more

Considerations when using Chef in a real-world environment

How to set up a pipeline for continuous provisioning with Chef and Azure

Who This Book Is For

This book is for infrastructure platform and operations engineers and DevOps specialists/practitioners working with infrastructure and platform provisioning on Microsoft's public cloud, Azure.

An understanding of programming in any language would be beneficial, but not necessary as the examples are designed to be easily readable by anyone with general IT experience.

While it is expected most users picking up this book will be on the Windows platform, a good proportion of compute workload on the Azure platform is Linux based. As a result the book includes examples that are relevant to both Windows and Linux platforms.

Stuart Preston is the Technical Director and co-founder of Pendrica, a technology consultancy based in the United Kingdom focusing on cloud automation with the Microsoft Azure platform. Stuart started his career as a trainee at University College London (UCL) in 1997 and quickly moved into consultancy. Over the last two decades he has specialized in delivering Infrastructure, Platform Architecture and Application Lifecycle Management consultancy on Microsoft.NET and Java-based retail and commerce platforms, motivated by big technical challenges and detailed problem solving that spans the business and technical domains.Prior to starting Pendrica, Stuart was the Chief Technical Officer at RippleRock and EMC Consulting. He resides in London, United Kingdom.