Target Mode with Serial Devices Usually, you will work with SSH or WinRM to connect to remote nodes and configure them. Those standard protocols bring along all the perks of a modern network connection: Encryption, Authentication, File transfers, etc But what if you have a device without network connectivity?
The kitchen-vcenter Driver While many companies already rely on some Cloud for all of their IT systems, bigger enterprise customers often have own data centers which consist of thousands of virtual machines. Under these circumstances, it is often not desirable to only test Chef cookbooks on AWS or Azure, but doing this in the real environment is a better idea. The kitchen-vcenter driver allows you to harness the power of your own IT systems.
The kitchen-ec2 Driver Within the Chef ecosystem, Test Kitchen is one of the most useful tools. It offers the possibility to quickly test cookbooks in different OS environments on machines with a limited lifetime. That way, you can check if your fancy recipes work the same on RedHat, Centos 6 and Ubuntu. As speed is king, this fast feedback motivates more for early testing and reduces the amount of bugs found in production.
Custom Resource Diffs in Chef If you are writing custom resources regularly, you might have been annoyed by a general “diff” functionality in Chef. In this post we will work on some snippets to make this possible
Writing Chef Target Mode Resources After my previous blog posts, you might be tempted to write your own Chef custom resources which are compatible with Target Mode. Luckily, this is very easy - so this will be a short one.
Local Preprocessing in Target Mode If you ever created configuration files with any automation system, you know that this involves a lot of templating. This is actually one of the most basic tasks that Chef performs and it is done using the template resource. With Chef’s Target Mode this currently is a bit more complicated.
Target Mode with Chef Server and Chef Automate It is not sufficient to provision remote devices via Target Mode but we also want an overview of node attributes, run history and changed resources. In this post we have a look at how to connect agentless resources with central servers to give us the much-needed visibility.
Agentless Provisioning with Chef One of the main points of criticism about Chef I heard over the last few years has been the need to have an agent deployed at remote machines. Sometimes that is not desired, sometimes it is not even possible. Due to this, configuring remote machines has become the stronghold of other tools - but a new feature of Chef changes the landscape fundamentally.
