Chef is written in Ruby and Erlang to streamline the task of configuring and automation of server software on servers on cloud-based platform. Automation in OpenStack is becoming an important service – we wrote before through previous articles. Rackspace Deployment uses Chef and Chef is Open Source Free Software. Knowing the minimum about Chef can help anyone – just a developer to software manufacturer.
Chef falls among Configuration Management Software – Configuration management (CM) is a systemsengineering process for establishing and maintaining consistency of a product’s performance, functional and physical attributes with its requirements, design and operational information throughout its life.
Basics of Chef Software and OpenStack Cloud
Chef can manage server software installation (such as Apache Web Server, MySQL, or Hadoop) and how they are to be configured. These process are called recipes and programmatically describe a series of resources that should be in a particular state – packages that should be installed, services that should be running, or files that should be written.
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The traditional software configuration management (SCM) process is looked upon by practitioners as the best solution to handling changes in software projects. It identifies the functional and physical attributes of software at various points in time, and performs systematic control of changes to the identified attributes for the purpose of maintaining software integrity and traceability throughout the software development life cycle.
Chef makes sure each resource is properly configured and corrects any resources that are not in the desired state. Official repo :
1 | https://github.com/opscode/chef |
Understanding How To Start Working With Chef Software and OpenStack Cloud (New Software Development)
We are taking that, the user is using Rackspace as OpenStack. It makes the things easier. Chef can run in client/server mode, or in a standalone configuration named “chef-solo”. In a client/server mode, the Chef client sends various attributes about the node to the Chef server. The basics can be found here :
1 | http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/installing-openstack-with-rackspace-private-cloud-tools#install-components |
Its quite logical and funny :
1 | https://github.com/tildedave/littlechef-rackspace |
Also, Rackspace Deployment exists to create Chef server itself.
Tagged With install openstack configuration management