Marschall - Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook

Matthias Marschall is a software engineer "Made in Germany". His four children make sure that he feels comfortable in lively environments, and stays in control of chaotic situations. A lean and agile engineering lead, he's passionate about continuous delivery, infrastructure automation, and all things DevOps.

In recent years, Matthias has helped build several web-based businesses, first with Java and then with Ruby on Rails. He quickly grew into system administration, writing his own configuration management tool before moving his whole infrastructure to Chef in its early days.

In 2008, he started a blog (http://www.agileweboperations.com) together with Dan Ackerson. There they shared their ideas about DevOps since the early days of the continually emerging movement. You can find him on Twitter as @mmarschall.

Matthias is a CTO at gutefrage.net GmbH, helping run Germany's biggest Q&A site among other high-traffic sites. He holds a Master's degree in Computer Science (Dipl.-Inf. (FH)) and teaches courses on Agile Software Development at the University of Augsburg.

When not writing or coding, Matthias enjoys drawing cartoons and playing Go. He lives near Munich, Germany.

My thanks go to my colleagues at gutefrage.net for all those valuable discussions.

I thank Adam Jacob, Joshua Timberman, and all the other great people at Opscode for your help with the book.

Special thanks go to my reviewers Seth Vargo, Julian Dunn, and Robert Curth who made the book so much better.

Finally, thanks to my wife Stephanie. You paid the price when the pressure rose and my thoughts circled around the book. Without you, this book would not have happened. You have my love always!

Robert Curth is a simple engineer working at gutefrage.net who reviewed this book through the eyes of a Chef novice.

Julian C. Dunn is a Senior Consultant with Opscode, Inc., the developer of Chef. He has 15 years of experience in software development and infrastructure operations at companies of various sizes across industries as diverse as finance, media/broadcasting, Internet security, and advertising.

Prior to joining Opscode, Julian was a Senior Operations Engineer at SecondMarket, Inc., where he managed infrastructure in Amazon EC2 using Chef. Before SecondMarket, he worked as web operations manager at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation where he managed content and streaming media delivery systems for Canada's largest website.

When not helping customers with automating all the things, he enjoys traveling, cycling, and stopping his cat from clawing the furniture.

Seth Vargo is a solutions engineer at Opscode, the maker of Chef. Seth created and currently leads the #learnchef campaigna program designed to interactively teach Chef to new users. A graduate of the Carnegie Mellon Information Systems program, Seth has been a developer and systems administrator for more than 12 years. He is a proponent of open source, and is the author of popular open source tools such as powify, bootstrap_forms, strainer, fauxhai, and many Chef community cookbooks. When he's not at home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Seth is traveling and evangelizing Chef at conferences, meetup groups, and open training courses.

I'd like to thank Matthias for taking the initiative and making the effort to produce this book.