He is a python enthusiast and best-seller at Fiverr known for his result-driven deliverables and satisfactory customer service. When he is not actively involved in all these, he reads and explores new things. Chef has been enhancing its features continuously and providing satisfactory customer service. World-leading IT companies like Facebook, AWS, HP Public cloud, etc., use Chef to streamline their DevOps processes.

On the other hand, if you have a  number of developers who are more familiar with the Go language, adopting Terraform will be a better option. If you need a tool with both declarative and imperative approaches to programming, Chef is a better choice than Terraform. DevOps engineers like to combine tools during development because no tool can fit an organization’s every need. So, if you need a tool that functions better with popular tools such as Docker or Packer, Terraform is a better option than Chef.

Independent of Clouds

Due to its automation and configuration capabilities, Chef DevOps is also renowned as a Server Configuration and Automation tool. If you are familiar with the Chef tools, automating and managing the software across several devices in your company only takes a few clicks. Chef is an open source systems management and cloud infrastructure automation platform. Opscode created the Chef configuration management tool, and the company later changed its name to Chef. There’s always a demand for deploying new services and software in an organization.

• It is used to streamline the task of configuration and managing the company’s server.
• DevOps engineer continues to be one of the most in-demand job titles out there.
• Moreover, you can also extend it to support the unique requirements of the environment.
• Sohail is an SRE, professionally experienced in IaaS, cloud computing, automation, and deployment.

You can pretty much automate most things with Chef, but as we have seen, it does come with a significant amount of coding. Cookbooks need to be built for the specific database versions you want to automate, and these cookbooks need to be maintained whenever you upgrade the databases. Building cookbooks to deploy and manage databases, especially when it comes to deploying replicated or clustered setups, may be especially challenging. And managing availability can also be tricky, as you really need to know how to perform failovers and reconfigurations so you do not end up losing data. This shall keep your managed files constant or updated when overwritten and avoid manual actions that do not adhere to your company policy and runbooks. There is a Chef server which stores each of these cookbooks and as a new chef client node checks in with the server, recipes are sent to tell the node how to configure itself.

How the serverless and cloud revolution diminished the need for static server configuration management

Ansible is a radically simple IT automation platform that makes your applications and systems easier to deploy. Avoid writing scripts or custom code to deploy and update your applications — automate in a language that approaches plain English, using SSH, with no agents to install on remote systems. First of all, there is support for user-created modules and resources. Chef’s tutorial claims it is possible to learn to write new resources in sixty minutes (including testing).

As the configuration is just code it can be tested and it can be version controlled. This means that there is less downtime, more reliable services and less stressed people on both the dev and ops sides. Chef is a popular configuration management tool designed to deploy, configure and manage servers. It may not be that easy to use, as you need to be a programmer to manage the configurations in Ruby DSL.

Setting Up Development Environment Using Vagrant

Read this feature comparison of two DevOps tools, Chef and Terraform, to enhance your IT efficiency. The Chef server is the brains of the operation which acts as a hub to store configuration data that chef devops certification is available to every node and also administer access rights. The main principle of Chef is to make users know best about their environment, what should be done and how it should be maintained.

Today, there is not much need for manual deployment or configuration. Therefore, using SSH in a specified ‘for’ loop is perfectly reasonable for executing server changes. Hence, automation is the change of a new era where Chef DevOps has come as a configuration management tool that is currently being used by many enterprises. Container-based application deployment, via tools such as Docker and Kubernetes, can take place without the aid of configuration management tools. While container-based and serverless apps are in the minority, they could become the standard way to run workloads in the future, and, in that case, configuration management would become irrelevant. Chef is a configuration management tool for dealing with machine setup on physical servers, virtual machines and in the cloud.

A Chef recipe is a file that groups related resources, such as everything needed to configure a web server, database server, or a load balancer. A recipe can be included in another recipe, may use the results of a search query and read the contents of a data bag (including an encrypted data bag). It must be added to a run-list before it can be used by the Chef Infra Client. It is always executed in the same order as listed in a run-list.