Matthias Marschall - Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook

Matthias Marschall is a software engineer "Made in Germany" and the author of the Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook by Packt Publishing. His four children make sure that he feels comfortable 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 moved 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) 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 at @mmarschall.

Matthias is the CTO of www.gutefrage.net GmbH that helps 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.

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

I would also like to thank Adam Jacob, Joshua Timberman, and all the other great people at Chef, Inc. for your help with this book.

Special thanks go to my reviewers, Earl Waud, Greg Swallow, Max Manders, and Robert Curth, who made this book so much better.

Robert Curth is an engineer at gutefrage gruppe. In his current project, HELPSTER, Chef is used to automate the server setup. When Robert is not programming, he organizes company events and talks about how to live a good life on his blog at http://rocu.de.

I want to thank all the amazing authors of Chef cookbooks and tools. Chef has come a long way since the first edition of this book!

Thanks, Matthias, for updating this book. I love how elegant many of these recipes are. I hope you, dear reader, enjoy them as much as I did!

Kristian Hoffmann is the sort of twisted individual who likes hacking code (in Perl, if possible) and cars (the smaller and faster, the better) and solving problems that would lead other people to throw their hands up in despair. After some early experimentation with Linux (circa Slackware 3.0), his tech career started as a lowly tech at a local ISP. He went on to complete his bachelor's in computer science, marry a fellow technophile, and rise to the ranks of the president/CTO in his adolescent ISP hacking grounds. He now enjoys the most significant challenge of raising two hopelessly tech-bound children.

Max Manders is a recovering PHP developer and former sysadmin, who currently works as a systems developer and ops engineer helping to run the Operations Centre for Cloudreach, an Amazon Web Services Premier Consulting Partner. Max has put his past experiences and skills to good use to evangelize all things DevOps, working to master Ruby and advocating infrastructure-as-code as a Chef practitioner.

Max is a cofounder and organizer of Whisky Web, a Scottish conference for the web development and ops community. When he's not writing code or tinkering with the latest and greatest monitoring and operations tools, Max enjoys the odd whisky and playing jazz and funk trombone. He lives in Edinburgh with his wife, Jo, and their cats, Ziggy and Maggie.

It's been an absolute pleasure to have the opportunity to provide a technical review of this book. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did! Thank you, Jo, for putting up with my mutterings and ignorance while I tinkered with the code in this book. And thank you, Shona, for sharing the load at work, affording me time to get this done!

Greg Swallow has been wrangling with all sorts of computers in the Indianapolis area for 20 years now, for folks like IN.gov, Expedient Data Centers, Salesforce, and Indigo BioAutomation. When he's not playing digital plumber, you can catch him on the roads and trails of Indiana, either on his bike or in his running shoes.

He has also reviewed VMware vSphere 5.x Datacenter Design Cookbook by Hersey Cartwright, Packt Publishing .

I would also like to thank Packt Publishing for offering me the opportunity to review this and other books. It's been fun!

Earl Waud is a Virtualization Development Professional with more than 9 years of focused industry experience creating innovative solutions for hypervisor provisioning, management, and automation. He is an expert in aligning engineering strategy with organizational vision and goals and delivering highly scalable and user-friendly virtualization environments.

With more than 20 years of experience developing customer-facing and corporate IT software solutions, Earl has a proven track record of delivering high-caliber and on-time technology solutions that significantly impact business results.

Earl lives in San Diego, California. He is blessed with a beautiful wife, Patti, and three amazing daughters, Madison, Daniella, and Alexis.

Thank you, my wonderful family, for allowing me to spend some of our precious family time to review this book. I love you and appreciate you, and I know I am truly blessed that you are my family.

Currently, Earl is a senior systems engineer with Intuit Inc., a company that creates business and financial management solutions that simplify the business of life for small businesses, consumers, and accounting professionals.