Targeted at administrators, consultants, and architect, the book guides them through the advanced features of the tool which are necessary for infrastructure automation, devops automation, and reporting. The book presumes knowledge of Ruby and Erlang which are used as reference languages for creating recipes and cookbooks and as a refresher on them to help the reader get on speed with the flow of book.
The book provides step by step instructions on installation and configuration of Chef, usage scenarios of Chef, in infrastructure automation by providing common scenarios like virtual machine provisioning, OS configuration for Windows, Linux, and Unix, provisioning and configuration of web servers like Apache along with popular databases like MySQL.
It further elaborates on the creation of recipes, and cookbooks, which help in deployment of servers and applications to any physical, virtual, or cloud location, no matter the size of the infrastructure.
The books covers advanced featureslike LWRPs and Knife and also contains several illustrative sample cookbooks on MySQL, Apache, and CouchDB deployment using a step by step approach.