DiscoPosse Review: Test-Driven Infrastructure with Chef by Stephen Nelson-Smith

tdi-chefWith all of the tools available for infrastructure automation, the next challenge is picking one to use and finding great resources to help you along the road of fully realizing the benefit. Look no further than Test-Drive Infrastructure with Chef by Stephen Nelson-Smith from O’Reilly Books because this is a phenomenal place to begin.

For those who haven’t taken a look at Chef (www.opscode.com), I highly recommend that you get started. Whether running as a standalone implementation using chef-solo, or the full infrastructure (chef open source or chef hosted), there is a huge community behind the product and Stephen’s book will get you diving into the code in no time!

Infrastructure as Code

The movement towards “infrastructure as code” is an important one. This isn’t your typical way of doing things for systems administrators today, and we are taking a page from the book of agile organizations and lean startups by driving towards this new way of managing infrastructure.

Don’t be afraid to be involved in the research process if you don’t think that it is directly applicable either. While you may not have the need for this today, it is almost inevitable that you will encounter orchestration platforms in your IT career, and what is even better is when you can drive towards the goal before it becomes something you’ve been told you missed out on.

Not just deployment

Test-Driven Infrastructure with Chef uses examples which show us how to write code, deploy machines, manage cookbooks, create unit testing strategies and more. This may seem like a hefty undertaking for some, but the truth of the matter is that you only finish a marathon by taking the first step.

The book has just had its full release so get on over to the download by clicking on the link below or the image above and get your chef on!

 

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