Chef Automation for the Symfony Developer
Building your servers manually is so last year. These days, the cool kids are automating their infrastructure. Chef has been popularized by big companies such as Facebook and Airbnb, but you don’t need to be a Fortune 500 company to benefit from it. In fact, you can easily start with just a few servers and use the free version of Chef!
Table Of Contents
Bridging the Gap by Using Chef
This article is intended as an introduction to Chef automation for small-to-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and Startups. It’s the result of my experiences using the framework for several years on various Symfony/PHP projects.
The gap between operations and developers is decreasing as platforms like Chef enable developers to be more involved in aspects that were traditionally ‘ops’ only. So, even if you don’t plan on being fully involved in DevOps, I believe that having a better understanding of a project’s infrastructure will help you become a better coder. It will improve the overall development process by minimizing the back and forth between you and DevOps.
Do I Need to Learn Ruby to Use Chef Software?
Chef is a Ruby-based framework. But don’t worry if you are not a Ruby developer. You’ll be interacting with small blocks of code – called resources – that are similar to PHP/Symfony helper functions. There are other similarities between the syntax of Ruby and PHP. In fact, the Domain Specific Language (DSL) used by Chef is a subset of Ruby, so most of the time you will be using only Chef DSL.
You’ll barely even notice you’re in a Ruby environment!
Why Use Chef?
This is the real question you need to ask yourself before you learn anything new. There are so many new platforms, frameworks, and languages coming out that being selective and methodical in your evaluation is more crucial than ever before. So rather than brush over this, I’ve tried to dive into all the reasons I think you should use Chef.
