Chef: Powerful Infrastructure Automation. Deploy software, manage hosts, and scale your infrastructure with Chef

Matthias Marschall, John Ewart, Earl Waud

Chef is a configuration management tool that turns IT infrastructure into code. Chef provides tools to manage systems at scale. This learning path takes you on a comprehensive tour of Chef's functionality, ranging from its core features to advanced development. You will be brought up to speed with what's new in Chef and how to set up your own Chef infrastructure for individuals, or small or large teams. You will learn to use the basic Chef command-line tools. We will also take you through the core concepts of managing users, applications, and your entire cloud infrastructure. You will learn the techniques of the pros by walking you through a host of step-by-step guides to solve real-world infrastructure automation challenges.You will learn to 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'sProvisioning tool. By the end of this course, you will be confident in how to manage your infrastructure, scale using the cloud, and extend the built-in functionality of Chef itself.The books used in this Learning Path are:1) Chef Essentials2)Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook – Second Edition3)Mastering Chef Provisioning

Instant Parallel Processing with Gearman. Learn how to use Gearman to build scalable distributed applications

John Ewart

Many of today's applications need to be able to process large volumes of data, and vertical scaling has its limits both in terms of prohibitive cost and hardware limits. Gearman is an open source job manager that is well-suited to building horizontally scalable systems, from map-reduce algorithms to simple data processors capable of handling massive amounts of information.Instant Gearman is a practical, hands-on guide to getting started with building an open source job management server system that is built to grow. Learn the basics of building a distributed application that spans multiple components and learn how Gearman fits into building an application that scales from one to hundreds of components that interact to process data. With Gearman, you can build software that scales horizontally as your need for computation increases.Instant Gearman has in-depth examples and a step-by-step approach to building distributed systems, helping you to build systems that are scalable and modular in their approach to processing data.Once you are comfortable with building simple workers and clients, learn how to build a cluster of managers and see how to reduce single-point-of-failure in your architecture. Next, build a simple map-reduce application using Gearman and scale it up from a single instance to multiple parallel processing components.