Chef vs. Ansible - Devops Days Berlin 2016

First published on November 17 2016 and tagged Tech . devops . devopsdays . Conference . Chef . Ansible .

Chef vs. Ansible: this was the talk Romain and I gave at Devops Days Berlin 2016.

It consisted in a few demos and code walk through, showing the attendees how to configure a server (including some services and a webapp) using either Chef and Ansible. We covered the main features of each technologies, and point out both their common grounds, limitations and qualities. The aims was also to help "troubleshoot" their issue on the selected technologies, and therefore getting out of the session an interactive tutorial.

You’ll find

This repo was done to demo the Chef part, my part. It introduces the following Chef concepts:

  • Chef nodes

  • chef-client

  • Chef resource

  • Chef recipes

  • chef-repo

  • Chef cookbooks

  • Chef template

  • Ohai

  • the use of a full-blown chef-repo holding multiple cookbooks

  • the user of Berkshelf for cookbook dependencies management

  • the use of the in memory chef server called chef-zero

  • the use of chef provisionning and treat our Vagrant vms as any other Chef resource using chef/provisioning/vagrant_driver

  • the use of the package resource: to implement the installation of nginx

  • the use of a Chef custom resource named fat_jar. fat_jar allows you to treat any given java fat jar (that is runnable jar, typically a springboot jar) as a resource, ; it assumes the jar is made available through a maven artifact repository ; it will donwload it ; it will configure the associated systemd service to run it as a service

  • the configuration of nginx for it to reverse-proxy a devopsdays fat_jar http service

This was done in 4 chapters, look into the subfolders README.md files