This book is your hands-on guide to infrastructure provisioning and configuration management in
the cloud using Chef's open source cross-platform toolset. With over 10 000 customers joining
the Microsoft Azure cloud platform each week and steadily increasing usage the need for
automation approaches has never been greater. This book provides both practical examples and a
much needed strategic overview of how these two technologies can be combined. Using Chef with
Microsoft Azure takes you through the process of writing 'recipes' in Chef to describe your
infrastructure as code and simplify your configuration management processes. You'll also meet
the Chef tools that can be used to provision complete environments within Microsoft Azure.
There are now a wide variety of tools and approaches that can be taken to provision resources
such as virtual machines within Microsoft Azure. This book demonstrates them discusses the
benefits and weaknesses of each approach and shows how a continuous provisioning pipeline can
be established as part of a reliable repeatable and robust provisioning process. Each chapter
has practical exercises that highlight the capabilities of both Chef and Microsoft Azure from
an automation perspective and can be executed on Windows Mac or Linux platforms. In this book
you'll learn: The purpose and principles behind automated provisioning Microsoft Azure concepts
and management options How to deploy Chef Azure Virtual Machine Extensions using PowerShell
Azure command-line tools and Chef Provisioning Chef Provisioning techniques including
provisioning PaaS resources such as KeyVaultHow to integrate quality tooling into the Chef
development lifecycle including Test Kitchen and InSpec with Azure compute resources How to
set up a pipeline for continuous provisioning with Chef and Azure Who This Book Is ForThis book
is for infrastructure platform and operations engineers and DevOps specialists practitioners
working with infrastructure and platform provisioning on Microsoft's public cloud Azure. An
understanding of programming in any language would be beneficial but not necessary as the
examples are designed to be easily readable by anyone with general IT experience. While it is
expected most users picking up this book will be on the Windows platform a good proportion of
compute workload on the Azure platform is Linux based. As a result the book includes examples
that are relevant to both Windows and Linux platforms.
