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Cloud Service Provisioning with Epsilon and Chef
MANAGE CONFIGURATION WITH CHEF
AUTOMATE WITH EPSILON
INTEGRATE EPSILON AND CHEF
Chef is one of the leaders of the configuration
management space. It provides a framework
that “makes it easy to deploy servers and
applications to any physical, virtual, or cloud
location”. The configuration of each node in
an organization is defined in ‘cookbooks’ (and
‘recipes’) and stored on a chef server, which
acts as a repository for configuration data.
Epsilon is an agentless, end-to-end IT
automation platform that you can use to
define and build workflows that orchestrate,
manage, and report on a datacenter. The key
advantage of Epsilon is its ability to seamlessly
integrate with most industry-leading
applications, such as email systems,
databases, ticketing systems, status monitors,
and build and deployment tools.
Configuration management is only a part of IT
infrastructure management in an
organization. Epsilon adds value to Chef by
integrating with other enterprise software to
automate IT processes. Apart from the
provisioning and configuration of servers,
typical service provisioning processes include
getting approvals for infrastructure and
integration with other enterprise software,
such as a CMDB or a Service Desk.
Relevant cookbooks are picked by chef_client,
which runs on the nodes, and applied to
respective nodes. This framework allows the
modelling and management of complex IT
infrastructure. Chef has a large community of
users who create cookbooks for solving
common - and some very complex - problems.
With Epsilon in their IT, an organization can
take its operations beyond deploying and
configuring machines, and convert it into a
fully-automated IT process management.
USE CASE: AUTOMATED SOFTWARE STACK DEPLOYMENT USING EPSILON
1
Idea Device Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
info@ideadevice.com | India – 1 800 200 5393 | US – 1 800 200 5393 | Singapore – +65 9857 4993
Cloud Service Provisioning with Epsilon and Chef
Consider the scenario where an IT team provides support to multiple sub-teams, which work on various software stacks,
LAMP, Java, and so on. The team has developed Chef cookbooks that spin up and configure development, test, and
production setups for each of these teams.
Typically, after an engineer creates a service request for a development environment, the IT team:
1.
Pick up the ticket from the Service Desk.
2.
Check the available capacity (both budget, as well as infrastructure).
3.
Look up the reporting hierarchy and get the requisite approvals.
4.
Use the provisioning system to provision the nodes.
5.
Use Chef to deploy the appropriate configuration to the nodes.
6.
Test the deployment.
7.
Update the CMDB.
8.
Send the engineer a notification with details about the deployment.
9.
Close the Service Desk ticket.
Apart from step 5 and parts of steps 4 and 6, the process is completed outside the Chef platform. The diagram shown above
depicts a completely automated process flow after Epsilon is integrated with Chef; the entire process can be written as a
workflow in Epsilon.
Backed by Epsilon workflows, a single ‘service catalog’ can be created on the service desk, which models the IT processes endto-end and internally uses Chef to deploy and configure servers.
2
Idea Device Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
info@ideadevice.com | India – 1 800 200 5393 | US – 1 800 200 5393 | Singapore – +65 9857 4993