Configuration management suite Chef Automate Configuration management suite

Chef Automate suite Suite consists of: Chef - infrastructure automation Habitat - application automation Inspec - compliance automation Everything is ruby.

Chef Provides tools for infrastructure automation. Has variety of already existing “recipes” for infrastructure tasks. Chef enables “Infrastructure as Code”, thus they are versionable. Uses ruby as a scripting language. Scripts are uploaded to server that executes them on nodes. Requires client to run on all the systems. Chef actions are executed by providers, thus actions are independent from system.

Habitat Wraps applications into packages that are ready for deployment into any environment. Habitat is platform agnostic. Capable of creating packages that can be run on Docker, rkt, Mesos, Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry. In addition provides option for monitoring these deployed containers. Habitat provides capabilities to: Build Deploy Manage Open source.

Inspec An “audit cookbook”. Monitors system compliance to requirements. Capable of monitoring: Server state Firewall and other security services state Application state Compliance to regulations. Provides preset library of compliances to use. Open source

Chef automate Packages Chef, Habitat and Inspec together. Gives full-stack approach for delivering applications to their respective environments. Provides tools that support workflow pipeline: Provides live support

Chef infrastructure Chef has 3 different type of machines working in its infrastructure. Workstation - machine that chef user uses Server - machine that has configuration information and applies changes to nodes Node - machine that hosts infrastructure and is managed by chef All Chef Automate suite products follows this formula, but they might use different names

Resource Resource is a chef statement that is used to express command. Chef client determines that provider to use for what command using Ohai. Resources that are grouped become recipes. Uses ruby syntax to describe them.

Cookbooks Cookbooks are libraries for resources. Usually they provide resources to work with some specific systems. They are supposed to provide everything that you need to support specific scenario. Cookbooks can have varying abstraction levels from providing access to system components to managing other resources or recipes. Habitat and Inspec are managed from Chef using their cookbooks.

Knife Command line tool that is used to run Chef commands locally and interact with various other Chef systems. Knife is used to install chef on systems, check system status, browse various other Chef artefacts. Can be extended using Chef maintained or community plugins.

Supermarket Place for exchanging cookbooks of chef recipes. Every cookbook defines the platforms it supports and version, thus they are updatable. Supports private supermarket - a supermarket, that can be installed on premises. Multiple supermarkets can be used as sources for dependency resolution. Interaction is done via knife. Provides RESTful API.

Chef users Chef is also used by IBM, HP, Intel, Facebook etc. Facebook uses Chef for system configuration. Before they used different tools to prepare systems for different applications. After deciding they need 1 tool to do this they chosen Chef. Facebook is contributing to Chef development and have some very popular cookbooks on github. Facebook was the first outside contributor to Chef. Their cookbooks are not published on supermarket because they are very specific and they don’t seem to behave well with other cookbooks.