Using Chef with Microsoft Azure

Abstract

This book is your hands-on guide to infrastructure provisioning and configuration management in the cloud using Chef’s open source, cross-platform toolset. With over 10,000 customers joining the Microsoft Azure cloud platform each week and steadily increasing usage, the need for automation approaches has never been greater. This book provides both practical examples and a much needed strategic overview of how these two technologies can be combined. Using Chef with Microsoft Azure takes you through the process of writing ‘recipes’ in Chef to describe your infrastructure as code, and simplify your configuration management processes. You’ll also meet the Chef tools that can be used to provision complete environments within Microsoft Azure. There are now a wide variety of tools and approaches that can be taken to provision resources such as virtual machines within Microsoft Azure. This book demonstrates them, discusses the benefits and weaknesses of each approach, and shows how a continuous provisioning pipeline can be established as part of a reliable, repeatable, and robust provisioning process. Each chapter has practical exercises that highlight the capabilities of both Chef and Microsoft Azure from an automation perspective and can be executed on Windows, Mac, or Linux platforms.