1.
QA to sous-Chef
Sajnikanth Suriyanarayanan
Presented at Devops Summit on 27th March 2014
& at DevopsSG on 2nd October 2013

2.
About Me
● Coastal GeoScientist and Civil Engineer
● 10+ years in Software Quality Assurance
and Functional Testing
● HP Certified Professional in Quality Center
● Lead Quality Assurance at Vistaprint
● http://sajnikanth.com

3.
● I’m a beginner
● May not be the standard way
● introduction to vagrant
● introduction to chef provisioning
● introduction to berkshelf
Disclaimer & Take-Away

4.
Contents
● Background
● Problem
● Vagrant + bash
● Vagrant + Chef
● Demo
● Lessons Learned

5.
Background
As Test Engineer, I usually:
● write test scripts
● merge pull requests
● deploy code
● test changes

6.
Problem
Current project is brand new. So:
● write test scripts
● merge pull requests
● deploy code (where to?)
● test changes

7.
● App lives locally
● Experiment with technologies (mysql or
mongoDB; apache or nginx;)
● Unstable environment
Problem ...
A server should be like a phoenix, regularly
rising from the ashes - Martin Fowler

8.
Vagrant + bash
● Reproducible
● Portable
● Isolated; room for experimentation
● Use Bash to install apps 'automatically'

9.
Vagrant + bash ...
Changing / maintaining bash scripts?

10.
Vagrant + Chef
Apprehensions:
● Ruby
● Steep learning curve
○ hosted chef or chef solo
○ knife
○ opscode
○ cookbooks
○ recipe
○ omnibus
○ information overload!!

11.
Forget it!
Let’s get our hands dirty

12.
Install nginx on vagrant VM using Chef
Pre-Requisites
● VirtualBox
● vagrant installed
● vagrant omnibus
● vagrant guest additions
● knife
Demo

13.
vagrant init
Demo - Initialize vagrant

14.
Demo - Create Cookbooks
mkdir ./cookbooks
knife cookbook site download nginx
Unarchive and delete tar

15.
Demo - Update Vagrantfile

16.
Demo - Let’s cook
vagrant up

17.
Demo - Results?

18.
Demo - Download apt
cookbook
knife cookbook site download apt

19.
Demo - Update Vagrantfile

20.
Demo - We try again
vagrant up
Cookbook bluepill not found
Cookbook rsyslog not found
Cookbook build-essential not found
Cookbook ohai not found
Cookbook runit not found
Cookbook yum not found
Cookbook yum-epel not found

21.
Demo - Download
cookbooks

22.
Demo - Update Vagrantfile

23.
Hungry Already?

24.
Demo - and again
vagrant up

25.
Easy way to manage cookbooks
gem install berkshelf
vagrant plugin install vagrant-berkshelf
Demo - enter Berkshelf

26.
cookbook 'nginx'
Demo - Berksfile

27.
berks install
Demo - using berkshelf
~/.berkshelf/cookbooks/

28.
Demo - update Vagrantfile
update Vagrantfile to use berkshelf
vagrant reload

29.
Demo - Results

30.
Demo - Resources
● Presentation link - http://j.mp/devops-summit
● Demo repo - https://github.com/sajnikanth/chef-berkshelf-demo
● Chef Tutorials
○ http://nathenharvey.com/blog/2012/12/06/learning-chef-part-1/
○ https://learnchef.opscode.com/quickstart/
● Berkshelf Introduction - http://youtu.be/hYt0E84kYUI

31.
3 Important lessons learned while using chef
● RTFM
● RTFM
● RTFM
Lessons Learned
Questions?