Articles in the category "chef"

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.

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.

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 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 As this tool continues to evolve and many examples are outdated, today I will give you some small snippets to reuse and get going quickly.

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!

It is time for a follow-up to my blog post from last year - especially as Test Kitchen 3.0 changed some defaults. Let’s check some cargo-culted settings out in this blog post.

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.

To our pleasant surprise, Chef awarded tecRacer the “2021 Technology Partner of the Year” title at the opening keynote of ChefConf 2021.