This document provides an overview of Chef and its capabilities for infrastructure automation and deployment. It discusses how Chef works using infrastructure as code to define reusable resources and automate deployment. It also covers Chef's porting to Linux on POWER systems and partnership with IBM, including support for Chef on various IBM platforms. The document concludes with an advertisement for a demo of using Chef to automate application deployment on Linux on POWER.

1. Chef on Linux on POWER
Alex Manly
Solutions Architect
Email: am@chef.io
Twitter: @apmanly

2. 16+ years experience in software engineering, design and architecture.
Previously worked at IBM GBS based in Southbank for 7 years.
Roles included developer, enterprise architect, VP product development
Speaker in all things Continuous – Deployment automation, testing
automation
Professional verticals have included financial (commercial and retail
banking), insurance, government and media
Based in London, UK
Who is Alex?

3. Contents
• What is Chef
• How Chef Works
• DevOps Rising
• The Chef Platform
• Porting to Linux on POWER
• Chef and IBM
• Chef on Linux on POWER Demo

4. Leader in next generation of automation solutions
Leading the DevOps movement
– Alignment between Infrastructure and Apps
Key partners: IBM, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft,
HP, Accenture, PWC, VMWare
100%+ Enterprise & Usage Growth Year over Year
Offices in Seattle, San Francisco, Atlanta, and London
What is Chef?

5. The New Face of Business
Chef is an automation and delivery platform
born in the service of velocity and scale.
In the data center
+ in the cloud
Infrastructure
+ applications
REQUIREMENTS

6. How Chef Works
• Define reusable resources and
infrastructure state as code
• Manages deployment and
on-going automation
• Community content available
for all common automation tasks
1 ▼ package “httpd” do
2 action :install
3 ▲ end
4
5 ▼ template “/etc/httpd/httpd.conf” do
6 source “httpd.conf.erb”
7 mode 0755
8 owner “root”
9 group “root”
10 ▲ end
11
12 ▼ service “httpd” do
13 action [:enable, :start]
14 done
15
1 ▼ windows_feature ‘IIS-WebServerRole’ do
2 action :install
3 ▲ end
4
5 ▼ windows_feature ‘IIS-ASPNET’ do
6 action :install
7 ▲ end
8
9 ▼ iis_pool FooBarPool do
10 runtime_version “4.0”
11 action :add
12 ▲ end
13
14 ▼ iis_site FooBarLTDSite do
15 protocol :http
16 port 80
17 path C:FooBarSite
18 action [:add, :start]
19 ▲ end

7. Chef Architecture
Code Revision
Control
System
Automation
Server
Nodes
Policy
State

8. Chef is Infrastructure as Code
Programmatically provision and
configure components
Treat it like any other code base
Reconstruct business from code
repository, data backup, and compute
resources

9. DevOps Rising
DevOps is a primary movement in the
growing trend to industrialize IT
service development and production.
IDC expects DevOps strategies will
increasingly dominate enterprise and
service provider strategies.
By 2016, DevOps will be employed by
25% of Global 2000 organizations.
DevOps technologies will achieve
revenue of $4B by 2018.

10. Chef is the leader of the DevOps market
Born with the DevOps movement
Partners with big web and the enterprise
Understands DevOps success patterns
Distilled these patterns into the Chef platform

12. Porting to Linux on POWER
• Actually very easy to do.
• Chef uses Omnibus to create cross platform chef clients for each platform.
• Followed x86 as much as possible, used GCC as the complier and not XLC.
• We had to make a few minor patches and upgrade to the latest versions of
everything for POWER, but it did "mostly just work”
• Chef Server uses OpenResty (a web server based on Nginx), OpenResty uses
Lua and we needed IBM to patch the LuaJIT for POWER support.
• Swapped the Oracle JRE to the IBM JRE.
• That’s all!!!
• By the way, POWER is the fastest kit we’ve worked on.

13. Chef and IBM
• Alpha versions of Chef Client 12 and Chef Server 12 available for Linux
on POWER for Ubuntu LE and Red Hat Enterprise 7 BE and LE. Beta
packages available by the end of June. Currently discussing adding
support for SLES and RHEL6.
• Official support Chef Client 12 on AIX versions 6.1 and 7.1 in December
2014. Has the ability to manage services, packages, file shares, user
and groups, cron jobs and file based resources. AIX cookbooks also
provides primitives to support other AIX services, such as initab and
inetd.
• Chef is core to IBMs OpenStack offering and IBM is very active in the
Chef OpenStack community. Use Chef to deploy and consume
OpenStack resources through knife-openstack, kitchen-openstack, Chef
Provisioning and OpenStack cookbooks.

14. Chef and IBM
• IBM’s SoftLayer Cloud also has great Chef support. The knife-
softlayer plugin allows you to easily launch, configure and manage
compute instances in the IBM SoftLayer Cloud. There is a Chef
Provisioning driver for SoftLayer written by an IBM employee:
https://github.com/IMC3ofC/chef-provisioning-softlayer
• IBM developed community cookbooks for managing IBM HTTP
Server, IBM Installation Manager, WebSphere Application Server,
WebSphere Liberty Profile and WebSphere eXtreme Scale.
• A Chef developed, soon to be open sourced, knife plugin that gives
knife the ability to create, bootstrap, and manage virtual machines
in a Linux Kernal-Based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisors such
as IBM PowerKVM. Plans for a kitchen and Chef provisioning
driver.

15. Chef on Linux on POWER Demo

16. Demo Steps.
• Make changes to application code.
• Locally test my changes:
• Lint testing – code correctness
• Unit testing
• System testing using a Docker container.
• Upload cookbook to hosted Chef Server.
• Bootstrap my Linux on POWER node with the Chef Client and register it with the
Chef Server.
• Assign the cookbooks to the run list of the Linux on POWER node.
• Converge the node.

17. ChefDK: TDI In a Box
Code Correctness
Unit Tests
Deploy sample environments
A wrapper to tie it all together
Not just syntactic correctness but quality gates too!

18. Rubocop
Because Ruby
• Identify potential Ruby errors
• Unclosed strings, etc.
• Identify style/convention that helps write better code
• Single quotes vs. double quotes
• This is useful for new Chefs, and helps make the code more readable
• Exclude rules that do not apply
• Not everyone is the same – some tests won’t work for your organization or for Chef code
• Run against static code, so tests are very fast (<5 seconds to run)
Code Correctness

19. Food Critic
Test Your “Chef Style”
• Flag problems that might cause your Chef cookbooks to fail
on converge
FC010: Invalid search syntax
• Identify style/convention that has been adopted by the Chef
community
FC004: Use a service resource to start and stop
services
• Create custom rules for your own organization’s
compliance/standards
COMP001: Do not allow recipes to mount disk volumes
• Run against static code, so tests are very fast (<5 seconds to
run)
Code Correctness

20. ChefSpec
Simulate Chef
• Did I send a properly formed piece of code to Chef?
• Especially important if there is mutability in your code
• This can cover things like feature flags, or behavior that changes on a
per-OS basis
• "If on Debian-based Linux I need to install package apache2, but on EL
variants I need to install package httpd.”
• Tests are very fast to run
• Even with simple code, it is useful for new Chefs to find simple errors
quickly
• Useful for regression testing – to make sure new changes
don’t break stuff that worked before.
Unit Tests

21. Test Kitchen
Let’s do this (almost) for real
• “Signal Out” testing for Chef code
• Just because I said something and it was interpreted correctly, doesn't mean that
what I said is what I meant.
• Executes your Chef code on an actual, factual node
• These nodes should be disposable (local virtualization – VMs /
Containers, cloud instances, etc.)
• Use any number of “signal out” testing products to ensure expected
results
• BATS
• ServerSpec
• Can pull in other cookbook dependencies as well, and execute against
a machine that looks the same as your standard image
Deploy sample environments

22. Infrastructure Change Control Pipeline

23. Demo Time

24. Thank You
Alex Manly
Email: am@chef.io
Twitter: @apmanly