Morgan Drake, Chef Software
When learning system automation, one of the most difficult learning curves new users face is the step between picking up a basic understanding of the automation language and understanding how to apply that language to their real-world infrastructure problems. This short session takes you through a true-to-life example of converting a Tomcat runbook with step-by-step installation instructions into a Chef recipe that automates the installation process.
All Chef tooling used is available as part of Chef’s open-source product suite.
Chef will be providing remote instances for you to work along. You will need a laptop and SSH client. This course assumes novice familiarity with the Linux command line and an editor such as Vim, Emacs, or Nano. Due to the time limitations of the course, we will be unable to provide tutoring for students not familiar with these tools.
While this course is specific to configuring Tomcat, the topics covered are applicable to many common automation tasks. We’ll also teach you how to use Chef’s documentation to keep learning as you take these skills back to your own infrastructure.
Morgan Drake, Chef Software
Morgan Drake is a Chef Solutions Architect, Linux engineer, and CS master’s student. She’s all in on enabling individuals and organizations to build faster, more reliable, and more humane IT infrastructures, and you’ll see her running Chef’s training courses, meetups, and weekly open source Office Hours. She has extensive professional experience in the academic and nonprofit sectors, and continues to volunteer in academia with a focus on enabling the technical skill sets of nontraditional students and dislocated workers. In her free time you’ll often find her watching professional wrestling while perfecting the art of hand embroidery.
author = {Morgan Drake},
title = {Chef: Scripts to Recipes},
year = {2017},
address = {San Francisco, CA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = oct
}
Some of our audiences for this material are novice sysadmins or those who are new to automation and want to get hands-on with Chef basics, developers who want to see what system automation is all about, and students who are learning about Linux administration.
Students will get hands-on experience using Chef to translate between a runbook script to an automated system configuration. Topics covered include: package installation, accessing remote files, user/group permissions, service management, and managing system files.
Configuration management, system automation, Chef