Stephen Nelson-Smith (@LordCope) is principal consultant at Atalanta Systems, a fast-growing agile infrastructure consultancy, and Opscode training and solutions partner in Europe. One of the foundational members of the emerging Devops movement, he has been implementing configuration management and automation systems for five years for clients ranging from Sony, the UK government and Mercado Libre to startups amongst the burgeoning London 'Silicon Roundabout' community. A UNIX sysadmin, Ruby and Python programmer, and lean and agile practitioner, his professional passion is ensuring operations teams deliver value to the business. He is the author of the popular blog http://agilesysadmin.net, and lives in Hampshire, UK, where he enjoys outdoor pursuits, his family, reading, and opera.

Test-Driven Infrastructure with Chef demonstrates a radical approach to developing web infrastructure that combines the powerful Chef configuration management framework with Cucumber, the leading Behavior-driven development (BDD) tool. Learn how to deliver real business value by developing infrastructure code test-first.

Infrastructure consultant Stephen Nelson-Smith shows you how this unique approach allows you to make significant changes without the fear of unexpected side effects—a great benefit when you’re developing code to control your production infrastructures. By using the test-first approach introduced in this book, you gain increased security, code quality, and peace of mind.

Learn the core principles behind the infrastructure-as-code approach, including modularity, cooperation, extensibility, and flexibility

Take a high-level tour of the Chef framework, tool, and API, as well as the community behind the project

Set up a workstation to interact with the Chef API

Get an overview of Cucumber and learn the principles of BDD

Start using Cucumber-Chef, the open source infrastructure testing platform

Explore test-driven infrastructure development with a hands-on tutorial