Chapter 3. Integrating with the Cloud

Being able to configure new hosts automatically means that if you outgrow your existing resources, you can easily bring up new servers to increase your capacity with very little effort. The Chef command-line tool, knife, provides the ability to provision new hosts with cloud services automatically from the command line if configured correctly. This chapter introduces you to using Chef with two popular cloud platform providers: Amazon EC2 and Rackspace Cloud. Here, you will learn to use knife with both of these providers in order to perform the following:

You will see that all of this can be done using the command-line tools provided without ever having to log in to the provider's web interface, and all of this within a few minutes of time.