Progress Chef is a DevSecOps solution that helps organizations worldwide configure, manage and deploy applications and IT infrastructure over multi-cloud and hybrid IT estates.
It helps orchestrate workloads on servers in a cloud or an on-premises data center. Instead of system administrators sweating over management programs designed for single, stand-alone servers, Chef allows DevOps professionals to spin off dozens or hundreds of server instances without worrying about maintaining the configurations or keeping them compliant.
Core engines keep the Chef solution up and running smoothly in the background. Progress Chef Infra is the hub for configuration data. It stores cookbooks, the policies applied to nodes and metadata describing each registered node that the Chef helps manage. Nodes use the Chef Infra Client to ask the Chef Infra Server for configuration details, such as recipes, templates and file distributions while Progress Chef Automate provides a unified view of the entire IT infrastructure managed by Chef Infra, Chef InSpec and Chef Habitat. It provides insight into operational, compliance and workflow events and includes a pipeline for continuous infrastructure and application delivery.
This blog explains how to set up Infra and Automate servers in two distinct ways.
Chef now collects aggregated and anonymized usage data to understand the Chef Infra Server adoption curve, operating systems that Infra Server runs on, deployed versions of Infra Server and deployment patterns. We have confirmed that the collected data helps protect the end user while providing meaningful usage insights. For more information, see the Chef Infra Server License Usage documentation.
Set the fully qualified domain name with $ hostnamectl set-hostname hostname. It’s critical that the fqdn value in the file matches the hostname –f value of the system. This works on AWS instances and local VMs.
Install the standalone chef-automate tool
$ curl https://packages.chef.io/files/current/latest/chef-automate-cli/chef-automate_linux_amd64.zip | gunzip -> chef-automate && chmod +x chef-automate
Set the mandatory environment variables.
$ sudo sysctl -w vm.max_map_count=262144
$ sudo sysctl -w vm.dirty_expire_centisecs=20000
Confirm that these are written to /etc/sysctl.conf so, it persists across reboots.
Run chef-automate to deploy Automate and Infra Server using product flags. Additionally, you can add --product builder to install Habitat Builder.
$ sudo ./chef-automate deploy --product automate --product infra-server
When the installation is complete, the dashboard, in this example, is available at https://<FQDN/IP-address>. The Automate login credentials are placed in a file generated in the home directory on your Automate host during installation.
$ sudo cat ~/automate-credentials.toml
NOTE: Chef Infra Server is installed using Habitat, so running $ chef-server-ctl reconfigure will not work. Instead, edit config.toml and run $chef-automate config patch config.toml to apply custom changes.
Chef Habitat is a patented automation tool that enables companies to apply a consistent approach to application definition, packaging and delivery across all applications and environments. You can deploy and run your Chef Habitat app on many infrastructure environments, including bare metal, VM, containers and PaaS.
Set up Chef Infra Server User and Organization. This example will create akshay.pem and lab-validator.pem files.
$ sudo chef-server-ctl user-create USER_NAME FIRST_NAME LAST_NAME EMAIL 'PASSWORD' --filename FILE_NAME
$ sudo chef-server-ctl org-create short_name 'full_organization_name' --association_user user_name --filename ORGANIZATION-validator.pem
For Example:
$ sudo chef-server-ctl user-create akshay Akshay Parvatikar akshay@chef.lab 'password' --filename akshay.pem
$ sudo chef-server-ctl org-create lab 'My Chef Lab' --association_user akshay --filename lab-validator.pem
By default, this Automate and Infra Server deployment is already set up for data collection. Don’t patch the default configuration with data-collector information.
NOTE:
The steps described here can be automated with a bash script. Update the variables to suit your requirements. Then, save as deploy-automate.sh on your raw Automate server, run $ chmod +x deploy-automate.sh, and execute with ./deploy-automate.sh.
#!/bin/bash
#Variables – Edit items which are in Bold and Italics
hostname=_'ec2-54-221-158-169.compute-1.amazonaws.com'_
username=_'akshay'_
longusername=_'Akshay Parvatikar'_
useremail=_'akshay.@chef.com'_
userpassword=_'password'_
orgname=_'lab'_
longorgname=_'My Lab'_
# Do not change the two dynamic variables below
userfilename="${username}.pem"
orgfilename="${orgname}-validator.pem"
# Do not change anything below
sudo hostnamectl set-hostname $hostname
sudo sysctl -w vm.max_map_count=262144
sudo sysctl -w vm.dirty_expire_centisecs=20000
curl https://packages.chef.io/files/current/latest/chef-
automate-cli/chef-automate_linux_amd64.zip | gunzip - > chef-
automate && chmod +x chef-automate
sudo ./chef-automate deploy --product automate --product
infra-server --accept-terms-and-mlsa=true
sudo chef-server-ctl user-create $username $longusername
$useremail "${userpassword}" --filename $userfilename
sudo chef-server-ctl org-create $orgname "${longorgname}" --
association_user $username --filename $orgfilename
Install Chef Automate and Chef Infra Server on standalone machines.
The standalone installation of Chef Infra Server creates a working installation on a single server. This installation method also applies to installing Chef Infra Server in a virtual machine.
To install Chef Infra Server:
For Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS:
$ sudo rpm -Uvh /tmp/chef-server-core-<version>.rpm
For Ubuntu:
$ sudo dpkg -i /tmp/chef-server-core-<version>.deb
Run the following to start all the services:
$ sudo chef-server-ctl reconfigure
Run the following command to create an administrator and Organization:
$ sudo chef-server-ctl user-create USER_NAME FIRST_NAME LAST_NAME EMAIL 'PASSWORD' --filename FILE_NAME
$ sudo chef-server-ctl org-create short_name 'full_organization_name' --association_user user_name --filename ORGANIZATION-validator.pem
To download the chef-automate command line tool, run the following command in your command line interface.
$ curl https://packages.chef.io/files/current/latest/chef-automate-cli/chef-automate_linux_amd64.zip | gunzip - > chef-automate && chmod +x chef-automate
Create a config.toml file with default values with the command.
$ sudo ./chef-automate init-config
If needed, make necessary changes to config.toml file
Adjust environment settings:
$ sudo sysctl -w vm.max_map_count=262144
$ sudo sysctl -w vm.dirty_expire_centisecs=20000
Deploy Chef Automate
$ sudo ./chef-automate deploy config.toml
Deployment takes a few minutes. The first step is accepting the terms of service in the command line, after which the installer performs pre-flight checks.
At the end of the deployment process, you will see Deploy Complete.
Nodes must send their run data to Chef Automate through the Chef server. To enable this functionality, you must perform the following steps:
All messages sent to Chef Automate are performed over HTTP and authenticated with a pre-shared key called a token. While every Chef Automate installation configures a token by default, we strongly recommend creating your own.
Create a new token from Automate UI.
Go to Automate UI > settings > automate API > create and copy token.
Run the following commands on Infra Server to set data collection settings.
$ sudo chef-server-ctl set-secret data_collector token '<API_Token>'
Channel the token setting through the veil secrets library.
$ sudo chef-server-ctl restart nginx
$ sudo chef-server-ctl restart opscode-erchef
Add the following setting by creating a new file chef-server.rb on Chef Server.
data_collector['root_url'] = 'https://<Automate_Server_IP>/data-collector/v0/'
# Add for compliance scanning
profiles['root_url'] = 'https://<Automate_Server_IP>’
To apply the changes, run $ chef-server-ctl reconfigure
License update information.
Docs page on how to Install Chef Infra Server With Automate
More info on Infrastructure Management Automation Tools
To learn more about Chef products, please contact your account team or visit us here.