Using Chef with Microsoft Azure This book is your hands on guide to infrastructure provisioning and configuration management in the cloud using Chef’s open source cross platform toolset. With over 10 000 customers joining the Microsoft Azure cloud platform each week and steadily increasing usage the need for automation approaches has never been greater. This book provides both practical examples and a much needed strategic overview of how these two technologies can be combined. Using Chef with Microsoft Azure takes you through the process of writing ‘recipes’ in Chef to describe your infrastructure as code and simplify your configuration management processes. You’ll also meet the Chef tools that can be used to provision complete environments within Microsoft Azure. There are now a wide variety of tools and approaches that can be taken to provision resources such as virtual machines within Microsoft Azure. This book demonstrates them discusses the benefits and weaknesses of each approach and shows how a continuous provisioning pipeline can be established as part of a reliable repeatable and robust provisioning process. Each chapter has practical exercises that highlight the capabilities of both Chef and Microsoft Azure from an automation perspective and can be executed on Windows Mac or Linux platforms. In this book you’ll learn: The purpose and principles behind automated provisioning Microsoft Azure concepts and management options How to deploy Chef Azure Virtual Machine Extensions using PowerShell Azure command line tools and Chef Provisioning Chef Provisioning techniques including provisioning PaaS resources such as KeyVault How to integrate quality tooling into the Chef development lifecycle including Test Kitchen and InSpec with Azure compute resources How to set up a pipeline for continuous provisioning with Chef and Azure. Chapter 1: Configuration Management Using Chef Chapter 2: Microsoft Azure Terminology and Concepts Chapter 3: Chef Azure VM Extensions Chapter 4: Using Chef Provisioning to Provision Machines Chapter 5: Advanced Chef Provisioning Techniques Chapter 6: Integrating Quality Tooling Into the Chef Development Lifecycle Chapter 7: Chef Concepts in the Real World Chapter 8: Pulling It All Together: Continuous Provisioning with Chef and Azure Chapter 9: Further Reading.