Articles in the category "Chef"

Out-of-Band Bootstrapping with Chef on AWS Systems Manager

A modern architecture avoids opening any SSH or WinRM/RDP ports to minimize the attack surface of your systems. Instead, management connections like the AWS SSM Agent should be implemented. But some tools, especially in the configuration management sector, still rely on direct access. Chef Infra is on track to break this limitation with its new support for out-of-band (OoB) bootstrapping using Knife and arbitrary Train transports.

Using AWS mac1/mac2 Instances with Test Kitchen

Everybody who had to write software or work with configuration management for Apple knows of the problems to get access to test machines. AWS does offer both Intel- and M1-based Mac instances now and with kitchen-ec2 v3.15.0 it is finally possible to use them in your existing workflow.

Dedicated Hosts with Test Kitchen

Sometimes, you need to deploy software for tests with special licensing terms. To solve this, AWS offers Dedicated Instances and Dedicated Hosts - and now you can use them with Test Kitchen 3.14 in your developer workflows.

Test-Kitchen on AWS (2022 edition)

Test-Kitchen is a tool to manage your test machine lifecycle, similar to HashiCorp Vagrant. While it has been developed with Chef in mind, it can be used with any development tool to test on new machines every time you change your code. As this tool continues to evolve and many examples are outdated, today I will give you some small snippets to reuse and get going quickly.

Airgapped Testing - VMware Edition

Recently, I got a bug report for the kitchen-vcenter driver, which allows lifecycle management of testing VMs on VMware vCenter environments. Apparently, a customer tried to create a VM without any network interface. The problem was that this crashed in a very unintuitive way. But it made me wonder: Would it be possible to use non-networked machines for tests? It turns out: That’s absolutely possible!

Third Party Platform Support for Chef

Currently, users of Chef are limited to working with the platforms supported by the Chef core. But with the advancements of Target Mode, the story could change quickly. Learn about the idea of a “Platform Support Pack” and what it could mean for the future.