Course Description
Using a Chef server can accelerate the process of deploying cookbooks while providing visibility into the state of your infrastructure. This course will focus on Chef server policy and remotely deploying cookbooks.
Learning Objectives
Why Use a Chef Server
- start the course
- describe why a Chef server is used and the cookbook distribution model
Getting Setup with Hosted Chef
- create an account on hosted Chef
- configure a chef-repo using the Chef server starter kit
- describe the chef-repo components and the user authentication model
Querying the Chef Server with knife
- use the knife command to view Chef server policy and node details
- upload cookbook policy to the Chef server using knife
Managing Nodes
- attach nodes to the Chef server with the knife bootstrap command
- configure run-lists for nodes in bulk with roles
- separate cookbook versions using Chef environments
Chef Server Indexing
- search for Chef server policy with knife
- refactor a recipe to utilize search to create dynamic policy with a Chef server
- create custom searchable datasets with data bags
Practice: Creating Users and Groups
- build a users cookbook that searches through a data bag to configure users and groups