Introduction

Welcome to the DevOps Toolbox, a step by step guide for the budding devops engineer who wants to enjoy the wonders of modern system configuration and management without having to become the “Server Guy”.

The goal of this guide to to teach you how to start simple, slowly adding more devops building blocks, and finally ending up with a reusable toolkit for you and your coworkers.

This guide will take you from a fresh OSX 10.8.2 install all the way through cloud server creation/deployment, including:

• Prerequisite Installation (XCode, Homebrew, RVM, Ruby 1.9.3, VirtualBox)
• Setup Project Configuration
• Vagrant/Veewee Installation
• Define/Create Boxes using Vagrant
• Provision Machine Instances (locally via VirtualBox)
• MultiVM management with Web server talking to a DB server
• Configuring Machines using Chef Solo for VirtualBox
• Customize Chef Recipes for our Application
• Create/Deploy a Simple Rails Application
• Migrate Chef Solo to OpsCode/Chef Server
• SignUp/Configure RackCloud
• Provision cloud servers [re]deploy our application

While this guide assumes you are on a OSX machine, most of this guide will apply to any Unix/Linux machine with a working compiler, supported Ruby version, and supported version of VirtualBox. While RackCloud is used, the same basic concepts and steps will apply to other cloud providers, like Amazon AWS/EC2.

Let’s Get Started!

1. Installing Prerequisites – XCode, CommandLineTools, Homebrew, RVM, Ruby, and VirtualBox
2. Project Setup – Create the git repository and directory structure for Vagrant, Chef, etc.
3. Vagrant/Veewee Installation – Install Vagrant/Vewee to create/control VirtualBox machines
4. Define/Create a Vagrant Box – Define and Create a Vagrant Box for use i VirtualBox
5. Provisioning Machines with Vagrant – Provision a cluster (Web/DB) of machines using Vagrant
6. Configuring Machines Using Chef Solo – Configuring our new machine instances using Chef Solo
7. Customizing Recipes for Our Application – Customize the recipes we have to prepare for our application deployment
8. Create and Deploy a Rails Applications – Create a simple Rails application and deploy it to our Vagrant instances
9. Migrate from Chef Solo to Hosted Chef – Migrate from using Chef Solo to hosted Chef at OpsCode
10. Migrate Servers to RackCloud – Migrate your servers from VirtualBox to “The Cloud” using Rackspace.