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Tag: configuration management

The Chef Firewall Cookbook: a Leaky Abstraction

The Chef Firewall Cookbook: a Leaky Abstraction

Published by Martin Smith on June 12, 2017

Managing a firewall is hard. Designing an abstraction layer on top of a firewall is even harder. Not only do you need to understand networking and your operating system, but you need to figure out a way to map common operations on firewalls to specific implementation rules. And you’ll need a way to manage firewalls across a fleet of machines. If this sales pitch hasn’t encouraged you to buy a hardware firewall yet… enter the Chef Firewall cookbook.

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Chef Provisioning on the Rackspace Public Cloud

Chef Provisioning on the Rackspace Public Cloud

Published by Martin Smith on October 15, 2015

Many companies use configuration management tools to manage their cloud servers and other cloud infrastructure. But some configuration management tools are now also enabling users to not just manage cloud servers, but actually create the servers as well. As part of the DevOps Automation Service, I most often work with a popular configuration management tool called Chef. Working in conjunction with Chef, there is also a project called Chef Provisioning that can use APIs to build cloud servers and Docker containers on many different providers (AWS, Azure, OpenStack, etc). Chef Provisioning can then bootstrap the new instance or container and begin configuration management tasks.

I’d like to introduce one specific driver for Chef Provisioning, the chef-provisioning-fog driver. This driver can be used with Chef Provisioning to build Rackspace cloud servers with simple Chef recipes. I will show an example of how to use these tools to automate building cloud servers, and provide you with an example you can try locally.

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