Chef is a configuration management and automation framework that can help you manage complexity, speed up deployment, plan for growth and prepare for disaster. Jennifer will walk through features of Chef that allow you to write recipes that describe your system, provision new instances, and use Chef Provisioning to create a sample full stack application topology.

1. Planning Application Resilience
Jennifer Davis
2/11/15

2. Goal: Communication
Jennifer Davis
Solutions Engineer
Twitter: @sigje
Hashtag: #getchef
Email: sigje@chef.io

3. Goal: Communication
Jennifer Davis
Solutions Engineer
Twitter: @sigje
Hashtag: #getchef
Email: sigje@chef.io
Hang out with me at the
Chef Booth, talk
Infrastructure and
recharge!

4. Agenda
• Resilience
• Introduction to Chef
• Striving for Resilience with Chef

5. Resilience

6. Resilience
• Elasticity – Spring back into shape
• Recoverability – Quick to recover/rebuild
• Malleability – Ease of change
Enduring Resilience

7. Resilient Organization
• Conway’s law
Organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which
are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

8. Culture – Rope Factor
Enough rope to get things done, not enough for
cowboys.

9. Signals – Rope Factor
• Rope too short
• Excessive time in meetings
• Death march for each sprint

10. Signals – Rope Factor
• Rope too long
• Cowboy behavior

11. Culture – Red Shirt Syndrome
Willingness to volunteer.

12. Culture – Borg Syndrome
Embraces Diversity.

13. Culture – Stormtrooper Syndrome
Role adherence.

14. Resilient Organizations to Resilient Software

15. Not Resilient: Minimized Change
• Security Patches?
• Over Engineering Delays in Schedule
• Under Engineering – Rewrite required to scale
Stability is a myth.

16. Resilient Software
• Elastic
• Configurable
• Responsive

17. Automation

18. Automation Platform
• Complex dependency handling between nodes.
• Fault tolerance.
• Security.
• Multi-Platform.
• Flexibility.

19. Introduction to Chef

20. Chef is a language.
• Describe infrastructure as
code.
• Programmatically provision and
configure servers.
• Versioning, artifacts

21. Chef is a toolset
• Collection of tools that allow you to model, measure, and improve workflows.

22. chef is a command line utility
• Generate skeleton for application, cookbook, recipes, attributes, files, templates,
and custom resources.
• Prep environment with correct ruby gems.
• Verifies environment is configured and installed correctly.

23. Chef is a community.
• Mailing lists
• https://supermarket.chef.io/
• Chef Conf 3/31 – 4/2 Santa Clara
• Chef Summit
• IRC #chef

24. Chef Fundamentals
… in 5 minutes

25. Chef Fundamentals
… in 5 minutes
https://www.chef.io/training/
March 5-6
SEKRET CODE 10% off:
HELLO-CHEF

26. Infrastructure Automation is creating
control systems that reduce the
burden on people to manage services
and increase the quality, accuracy and
precision of a service to the
consumers of the service.

27. Infrastructure Elements to Resources
file
package
cron
user
File
Package
Cron Job
User

28. Resources
• Fundamental building blocks
• Describes piece of system and it’s desired state
• Chef DSL is ruby.

29. Example of describing a resource
Recipe: (chef-apply cookbook)::(chef-apply
recipe)
* package[nano] action install
- install version 2.0.9-7.el6 of package
nano
sudo chef-apply -e "package 'nano'"

30. Test and Repair
Resources follow a test and
repair model
• package ”nano"
Is nano installed?
Done Install it
Yes No

31. Recipe
• A recipe is an ordered list of resources.

32. Recipe
package “httpd”
template “/var/www/html/index.html” do
source “index.html.erb”
end
service “httpd” do
action [:enable, :start]
end

33. Cookbook
• A collection of recipes (and other elements like files and templates).
• Map 1-1 to a piece of software or functionality.
• Distribution unit
• Versioned
• Modular and re-usable.

34. Chef Provisioning – Part of Chef DK
https://flic.kr/p/knDPjc
• Describe multiple tier applications.
• Deploy many copies of your
application cluster.
• Spread cluster across different clouds/
machines.
• Orchestrate deployment.
• Parallelize machine deployment.

35. Striving for Resilience with Chef

36. Chef Provisioning
machine ‘web1’ do
recipe ‘webserver’
end

37. Multi-platform
• AWS
• Azure
• Fog
• Vagrant
• Docker
• LXC
• .. more
.. We’ll use AWS in this example
https://github.com/chef/chef-provisioning-aws
http://aws.amazon.com/start-ups/loft/

38. AWS
• SQS Queues
• SNS Topics
• Elastic Load Balancers
• VPCs
• Security Groups
• Instances
• Images
• Autoscaling Groups
• SSH Key pairs
• Launch configs

39. AWS Config: ~/.aws/config
[default]
region=us-­‐west-­‐2
aws_access_key_id
=
aws_secret_access_key
=

40. Cookbook Setup
$ chef generate cookbook webserver

41. Provision Recipe
$ cd webserver
$ chef generate recipe provision

42. Edit Provision Recipe
$ vi recipes/provision.rb

43. Edit Provision Recipe
require “chef/provisioning/aws_driver”
with_driver “aws”
machine ‘web1’ do
recipe ‘webserver’
converge true
end

45. ..but I need multiple webservers
require “chef/provisioning/aws_driver”
with_driver “aws”
num_webservers = 3
(0… num_webservers).each do |i|
machine “web_0#{i}” do
recipe ‘apache’
end
end

46. …add security
aws_security_group "#{name}-http" do
inbound_rules [{:ports => 80, :protocol => :tcp, :sources =>
['0.0.0.0/0']}]
end

47. …add security
with_machine_options({
:bootstrap_options
=>
{
:security_groups
=>
[
"#{name}-­‐http”]
}
})

48. ..add load balancing
load_balancer
"#{name}-­‐webserver-­‐lb"
do
load_balancer_options({
:availability_zones
=>
["us-­‐west-­‐2a",
"us-­‐west-­‐2b",
“us-­‐
west-­‐2c"],
:listeners
=>
[{:port
=>
80,
:protocol
=>
:http,
:instance_port
=>
80,
:instance_protocol
=>
:http
}],
:security_group_name
=>
“#{name}-­‐http”
})
machines
elb_instances
end

49. Resilient Software
• Elastic
• Configurable
• Responsive

50. Bulkhead Pattern
• Compartmentalization to limit failure.
• Repeatable Clusters
• … across platforms.

51. Review
• Resilience
• Organizational – Conway’s Law
• Software
• Introduction to Chef
• Fundamentals, Infrastructure as Code, Chef Provisioning
• Striving for Resilience with Chef
• Examples Chef Provisioning

52. Jumpstart Learning
• The LearnChef Site
• Guided Tutorials
• Chef Fundamentals intro
http://learnchef.com
• How-To’s, Conference Talks, Webinars, more
http://youtube.com/user/getchef
• Attend a Chef Fundamentals Class (HELLO-CHEF code)

53. Further Resources
• http://chef.io
• http://docs.chef.io
• http://supermarket.chef.io
• http://lists.opscode.com
• irc.freenode.net #chef
• Twitter @chef #getchef, @learnchef #learnchef

54. Thank you!
Jennifer Davis
Twitter: @sigje
Hashtag: #getchef
Email: sigje@chef.io