Joshi M. - Mastering Chef

Mayank Joshi works for Indix as a DevOps engineer. He has worn many hats during his 10-year long career. He has been a developer, a systems analyst, a systems administrator, a software consultant, and for the past 6 years, he has been fascinated with the phenomenal growth witnessed in cloud environments and the challenges of automation associated with the hosting of the infrastructure in such environments. Prior to Indix, he worked for start-ups such as SlideShare, R&D organizations such as CDAC, and even had a stint at a highly automated chemical plant of IFFCO.

I would like to thank all my fellow colleagues at Indix for their wonderful support and allowing me to get some spare time amid some very tight work schedules.

I wouldn't have been able to work on cloud platforms and configuration management systems had I not associated with SlideShare. Thanks much, guys!

I would also like to thank my family for bearing with me while I was spending most of the time either working or writing the book.

Last but not least, special thanks to the wonderful team at Packt, especially Parita and Meeta, who really pushed me whenever I was losing focus.

Omri Bahumi started his relationship with Linux in 1999 at the age of 12. Since then, he has managed to engage with various areas of Linux-based production systemsfrom high performance network servers to low-level debugging and advanced networking trickery. He serves in EverythingMe's operations team, where he's in charge of designing, building, and deploying multi-data center cloud infrastructures for developers and users alike. A typical day in his life includes a mixture of having coffee, coding in various languages, managing AWS stacks, taming Docker and Chef, and working with engineers on upcoming features (not necessarily in this order). In his spare time, he likes to hack on Arduino, Raspberry Pi, ESP8266, and all sorts of programmable hardware, making cool electronic projects.

Evgeny Goldin is a Ruby, Groovy, and Scala software developer who turned into an automation and release engineer to introduce order where chaos usually reigns. On an average day, all things related to cloud, automation, and continuous delivery get his immediate attention. Back at home, he's a proud father of a 1-year-old son, dreaming of a day when a proper tech talk would happen between the two! When he has any spare time left, he explores the subjects of aviation safety, functional programming, and web security. He's an open source developer, speaker, and passionate advocate when it comes to tools and techniques that lead to smooth and painless release processes.

Panagiotis Papadomitsos is a distributed systems architect in the mobile intelligence division of Splunk, where he is responsible for the design, implementation, and maintenance of a self-healing, always-on highly distributed application mesh that spans three clouds and receives more than 450 billion events per hour from devices spread across the globe. He's been working with distributed systems for the past 10 years in various companies and positions, with responsibilities ranging from designing and implementing complex heterogeneous infrastructures using Chef and the Chef ecosystem to architecting and coding low-latency distributed applications in Erlang and Nginx/Lua, contributing code back to the community whenever possible. He is a performance-tuning enthusiast; you'll often find him measuring and optimizing critical code execution paths from the application level down to the OS kernel level. When away from the computer screen, he enjoys surfing, snowboarding, and playing the guitar.

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Preface

The core philosophy behind configuration management systems has its roots in the US Department of Defense, where it was adopted as a technical management discipline. Today, the philosophy has been adopted by many other disciplines, including systems and software engineering. The basic idea behind a configuration management system is to establish and maintain the consistency of a system or product throughout its lifetime. The following are the fundamental activities associated with any configuration management system: