In this part we would configure chef workstation that we created in Part 1 to provision nodes on the Rackspace cloud provider.
Chef Terminology
Before we go over details of how to provision a Rackspace VM, lets review the chef terminology so that we have some common vocabulary
- Nodes: Servers, VMs or physical machines or cloud instances.
- Cookbook: A cookbook is a collection of recipes, attributes, and templates that Chef uses to package, distribute, and share configuration details. A chef repository can have many cookbooks and typically a cookbook configures only one service.
- Roles: Roles are a way to group nodes by the function. Each role is associated with a run_list i.e. a set of cookbook/recipies that need to execute in given sequence for configuring the node. Nodes can have multiple roles.
- Environments: In chef different nodes could belong to different environments like dev, stage, prod, etc. Like roles environments also have a run_list.
- Data Bags: Data bags are like cookbook attributes but are used to store sensitive information like passwords, api keys, secrets, etc.