Chapter 8. Using Chef Provisioning

In this chapter, you're going to learn to use Chef provisioning.

Wait… what? This is the last chapter in the book titled Chef Provisioning, and now you are going to learn to use Chef provisioning? What were we doing in Chapters 1–7?

Yes, in Chapters 1–7, we were doing Chef provisioning, but ChefDK actually comes with a feature named Chef Provisioning. In the earlier chapters, you learned how to use Chef to provision into a variety of hosting solutions, both in the data center and the cloud. However, most of the work we did to provision our environments was done in single-instance bites, creating one server instance at a time. All perfectly acceptable and very valuable. However, in the world of a DevOps Engineer, it is a rare situation when a single instance is all that is needed for an application. These days, distributed applications are built in clusters. An app will require multiple web servers, databases, app servers, networking and load balancers, and...