Test-Driven Infrastructure with Chef
Bring Behavior-Driven Development to Infrastructure as Code
By Stephen Nelson-Smith; O’Reilly Media, Inc.
This is a review of Test-Driven Infrastructure with Chef, I picked up this book as I was wanting to learn more about using chef in my job as a Systems Engineer. We were just getting started with deploying chef into our infrastructure.
Stephen Nelson-Smith has delivered a comprehensive guide to implementing a test driven workflow for managing systems infrastructure with chef. This book is an excellent resource for those getting started with chef as it clearly explains the basics of chef, including a great intro to ruby, the origins of test driven development, and infrastructure as code. If you do not yet understand any of these concepts, Nelson-Smith takes the time to get you up to speed. As someone from the Operations and Systems Administration side of DevOps just getting started with chef myself, some of the content was a little too complicated upon first reading, but I find myself referring back to the more complicated sections over and over again as my knowledge and absorption of the concepts grew. The book has become a recurring reference material for my own chef journey and each time I return to the book, I pick up more and more complexity that I missed upon first reading. The author uses a very detailed approach to explain how and why he performs certain steps and what his thought process was as he explores the toolchain. This approach is particularly helpful as reading the book is almost like have a chef expert by your side coaching you through your experience. Its a great read and I recommend it for those getting started with chef as well as those who are wanting to incorporate a test driven workflow into their existing chef deployments.