Test-Driven Infrastructure with Chef [Paperback]

Stephen Nelson-Smith (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 7, 2011

Test-Driven Infrastructure with Chef demonstrates a radical approach to developing web infrastructure that combines the powerful Chef configuration management framework with Cucumber, the leading Behavior-driven development (BDD) tool. Learn how to deliver real business value by developing infrastructure code test-first.

Infrastructure consultant Stephen Nelson-Smith shows you how this unique approach allows you to make significant changes without the fear of unexpected side effects—a great benefit when you’re developing code to control your production infrastructures. By using the test-first approach introduced in this book, you gain increased security, code quality, and peace of mind.

• Learn the core principles behind the infrastructure-as-code approach, including modularity, cooperation, extensibility, and flexibility
• Take a high-level tour of the Chef framework, tool, and API, as well as the community behind the project
• Set up a workstation to interact with the Chef API
• Get an overview of Cucumber and learn the principles of BDD
• Start using Cucumber-Chef, the open source infrastructure testing platform
• Explore test-driven infrastructure development with a hands-on tutorial

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Stephen Nelson-Smith (@LordCope) is principal consultant at Atalanta Systems, a fast-growing agile infrastructure consultancy, and Opscode training and solutions partner in Europe. One of the foundational members of the emerging Devops movement, he has been implementing configuration management and automation systems for five years for clients ranging from Sony, the UK government and Mercado Libre to startups amongst the burgeoning London 'Silicon Roundabout' community. A UNIX sysadmin, Ruby and Python programmer, and lean and agile practitioner, his professional passion is ensuring operations teams deliver value to the business. He is the author of the popular blog http://agilesysadmin.net, and lives in Hampshire, UK, where he enjoys outdoor pursuits, his family, reading, and opera.

Product Details

• Paperback: 88 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media (July 7, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1449304818
• ISBN-13: 978-1449304812
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.8 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #713,525 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good Introduction, October 9, 2011

By 

afrazkhan "frazmatron" (London) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Test-Driven Infrastructure with Chef (Paperback)

It's a good introduction to the subject, and should be enough to get you going. Like all study, you will need to put time in outside of class! ;)

Yays:
* The first chapter on Infrastructure as Code is good overview of the motivations behind Chef, and is informative to anyone coming afresh to this kind of tool.
* Next two chapters on introducing Chef are a good lightweight introduction, and covers the basics of getting set up.
* The BDD chapter was interesting background, and clearly what the author is trying to do with Cucumber-chef is striking a nerve.

Boos:
* Didn't cover the Open Source server.
* The cucumber-chef chapters feel rushed and contain several mistakes. However sprinkled throughout the chapter is some excellent material explaining the concepts of chef. The worked example is rather trivial, and it feels incomplete. The cucumber-chef tool has had some attention recently and is beginning to attract a few more eyes, but this really needs more development effort.

Overall: Good lightweight introduction to Chef, the test-driven infrastructure idea is interesting but is not carried out completely.

9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Sloppy Book, July 22, 2011

By 

andyl - See all my reviews

This review is from: Test-Driven Infrastructure with Chef (Paperback)

The subject material is interesting, but the book is badly edited. It reads more like corporate shill for OpsCode and Atlanta systems than a tech book. The material is 70 pages long - but there is a ton of fluff - it could have been 1/3 as long easily.

I was disappointed that the book didn't show the use of chef-solo. And I was disappointed that the testing solution only works with AWS. It would have been great have an option to use local VMs - perhaps based on Vagrant/VirtualBox.

I hope that someone else writes a good book on Test-Driven Infrastructure with Chef.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Concise and entertaining manifesto for test-driven infrastructure, October 14, 2011

By 

Bitfield - See all my reviews

This review is from: Test-Driven Infrastructure with Chef (Paperback)

This slim volume is a good introduction to Chef, with sufficient worked examples to get you up and running with a Chef-powered server fairly quickly. However, the author wants to do more than just teach you Chef: he wants to introduce you to a particular way of thinking about infrastructure, "Infrastructure as Code".

If services are provisioned by programs, then we can - and should - test those programs. Further, we can write them in a test-driven style: start with the description of how the service should behave, and write a test that expresses this. Then write code that makes that test pass.

Nelson-Smith argues that this and other techniques from the Agile school of software development are of great benefit to systems administrators building modern automated infrastructures. He not only makes a convincing case for test-driven infrastructure development, but has provided a helpful tool for doing it, 'cucumber-chef', which is introduced in the book with a detailed example.

There is a great deal of debate over which is the best configuration management tool. However, it doesn't matter which tools you use to build a house if the house subsequently falls down. Nelson-Smith gets this point - the book isn't called "Chef-Driven Infrastructure with Tests". His message, with which I wholeheartedly agree, is that we should apply to infrastructure code the lessons learned from the last decade of progress in software development. To that end, the book is both timely and important.

(Full disclosure: Steve is a good friend and former colleague of mine; however, I have no affiliation with him and we are now competitors, both for consulting work and for book sales. I was supplied with a copy of this book for review purposes.)