Chapter 7. Servers and Cloud Infrastructure

"The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we've redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do."

Richard Stallman

In this chapter, we will cover the following recipes:

• Creating your infrastructure using Chef Provisioning

• Creating cookbooks from a running system with Blueprint

• Running the same command on many machines at once

• Setting up SNMP for external monitoring services

• Deploying a Nagios monitoring server

• Building high-availability services using heartbeat

• Using HAProxy to load-balance multiple web servers

• Using custom bootstrap scripts

• Managing firewalls with iptables

• Managing fail2ban to ban malicious IP addresses

• Managing Amazon EC2 instances

• Loading your Chef infrastructure from a file with spiceweasel and knife