Book excerpt: Learn Chef Provisioning like a boss and finally own your infrastructure About This Book This is the first Chef book focused on provisioning infrastructure as its sole task. The book offers a clear solution to a specific pain point: learn to make your system work faster. Learning better approaches to load balancing and parallelization with this book will save you time By mastering the techniques in this book, you will know how to run an entire fleet of machines without breaking a sweat This book is more helpful than the documentation ( https://docs.chef.io/provisioning.html), with a stronger guiding voice and clearer explanations and use cases Who This Book Is For This book is for Software Engineers, System Administrators, or DevOps Engineers who need to quickly deliver reliably consistent infrastructure at scale. You are expected to have intermediate experience with Chef and Ruby and will be reading this book to advance your knowledge and take your skillset to the next level. What You Will Learn Use best practices to describe your entire infrastructure as code Automate and document every aspect of your network, from the hardware of individual nodes to software, middleware, and all containers and clouds Create a perfect model system Make the best possible use of your resources and avoid redundancy Deliver on the promise of Infrastructure as Code Scale with ease by properly provisioning their infrastructure Use the best Test Driven Development methodologies In Detail This book will show you the best practices to describe your entire infrastructure as code. With the help of this book you can expand your knowledge of Chef because and implement robust and scalable automation solutions. You can automate and document every aspect of your network, from the hardware to software, middleware, and all your containers. You will become familiar with the Chef's Chef Provisioning tool. You will be able to make a perfect model system where everything is represented as code beneath your fingertips. Make the best possible use of your resources, and deliver infrastructure as code, making it as versionable, testable and repeatable as application software Style and approach By dedicating a whole book solely to the question of provisioning, this book will teach administrators to use Chef as a birds-eye lens for their entire system. It will moves you away from the specifics of each machine and its automations and instead will teach you them how to approach the entire cluster as something different than the sum of its parts. By focusing on infrastructure as code as its own project, the book offers elegant, time-saving solutions for a perfectly described and automated network.