Get rid of your Shell Scripts!

Manage Infrastructure as Code with Chef

Chef in a Nutshell

 

The Chef software family allows users to configure their IT systems and monitor them constantly.

In classical environments, configuration is done manually or with long shell scripts – making it non-reproducible or only applicable once. When using Chef, you state your desired state and your expectations of the configured system in an OS-independent way.

This configuration is portable across platforms and violations of your expectations will be automatically detected, reported and corrected.

Solutions

Compliance Automation

Chef InSpec – Verify your IT systems‘ compliance and security posture, using CIS-certified benchmarks.

Infrastructure Automation

Chef Infra Client – Discover the „Test & Repair Principle“: Keep your infrastructure current and revert all manual changes within seconds.

Application Automation

Chef Habitat – Roll out software across different systems, platforms and runtime engines like Kubernetes or Docker.

Automated Insights

Chef Automate – Implement a company-wide dashboard for managed servers, desktop clients, applications and their compliance status.

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Our Offerings

DevOps Transformation

„DevOps“ is not a buzz word but a radical change of mentality and tools, which requires a long-term effort.

One of its main ideas is to spend more time on tasks that add value than on repetition or hand-overs between departments.

Starting with DevOps is not a sprint, but a marathon involving training, communication, exercise and mutual understanding.

As part of our Chef consulting, we guide you through all these related changes which are crucial to introducing tools like Chef – because DevOps is more about interactions than tools.

Professional Services + Development

If you just set up a web server in the cloud, things tend to be straightforward. But most projects, especially in an enterprise context, are mainly one thing: really complex.

Our consultants have been working with Chef for years and know when to deviate from the usual patterns. Starting with hands-on training and guiding you along the full implementation cycle, we can help you avoid the obstacles you would run into if you were purely self-studying. Our goal is to enable you and your employees to be self-sustaining within the Chef ecosystem, while offering you specialized consulting later on.

As every big project has its special requirements, we also develop technology just for you: Custom resources for Chef and InSpec, helper libraries and inventory plugins – even specialized drivers to enable you to test on your own infrastructure.

We love open source and publish our contributions to the ecosystem whenever possible.

Licensing

Software licenses are complex and confusing. We offer to be your partner in this area, by checking your actual requirements and finding the best solution together with the vendor themselves.

tecRacer has been selling Chef licenses for years, from small customers to international enterprises. Contact us and talk to people who actually know the software that you want to buy – not somebody who just offers everything.

Training

As every journey should start with thorough preparation, we are offering you the official Chef curriculum. And as reality rarely follows your textbooks, we are adding our practical project knowledge on top.

While there are many books and video courses on Chef, much of it is either dated or created out of pure theory. Instead of buying this book from 2013, you should get some first-hand knowledge of how things evolved over time.

tecRacer as CHEF Principal Partner

tecRacer has been awarded Principal Partner status in 2020, the highest partner level of Chef.

With this status, Progress Chef only distinguishes those partners who have the highest level of expertise, have a major influence on the market and can master both small and large customer projects with confidence.

Parallel to this, the cooperation at conferences and user groups has continued to grow: tecRacer has created the Chef Usergroup Germany. The Usergroup will not only invite speakers from tecRacer and other companies, but also Chef employees from different countries have expressed interest in reporting on news and their experiences.

Chef and tecRacer complement each other since 2017 in the area of Progress Chef Professional Services, Consulting, Reselling and Training. The segment for the DACH area has been experiencing continuous growth for years.

Blog

  • Centralized traffic filtering using AWS Network Firewall
    am 27. November 2023

    In the process of constructing your Hybrid Hub and Spoke Network within the Cloud, which includes the integration of On-Premises networks and allows internet-based access, the implementation of a network firewall is essential for robust security. This security measure involves thorough traffic analysis and filtering between the entities to safeguard against both internal and external cyber threats and exploits. By actively monitoring and inspecting the flow of traffic, a network firewall plays a crucial role in identifying and blocking vulnerability exploits and unauthorized access attempts. Within the AWS ecosystem, the AWS Network Firewall is a service that is often used for achieving a high level of network security. As a stateful and fully managed network firewall, it includes intrusion detection and prevention capabilities, offering comprehensive protection for VPC-based network traffic. This blog post aims to guide you through the process of integrating the AWS Network Firewall into your hybrid AWS Hub and Spoke network. By doing so, you can effectively analyze, monitor, and filter both incoming and outgoing network traffic among all involved parties, thereby enhancing the overall security of your infrastructure layer.

  • Harnessing the Power of Serverless PHP with Laravel Vapor
    am 20. November 2023

    I need to start this blog post with a confession. But only if you promise to not tell anything to my tecRacer colleagues, deal? So, I built a monolith. And I loved it. And you will likely love it too if you decide to try out Laravel. Luckily, there is a service called Vapor that will let you deploy your Laravel project on serverless AWS infrastructure. That means I can continue to enjoy the top-notch developer experience of Laravel while also getting all the benefits of serverless technologies (plus, I can maintain a healthy relationship with my colleagues 🎉). But let’s start at the beginning.

  • Build Golden AMIs with Packer and AWS CodePipeline
    am 16. November 2023

    When leveraging AWS services such as EC2, ECS, or EKS, achieving standardized and automated image creation and configuration is essential for securely managing workloads at scale. The concept of a Golden AMI is often used in this context. Golden AMIs represent pre-configured, hardened and thoroughly tested machine images that encompass a fully configured operating system, essential software packages, and customizations tailored for specific workload. It is also strongly recommended to conduct comprehensive security scans during the image creation process to mitigate the risk of vulnerabilities. By adopting Golden AMIs, you can ensure consitent configuration across different environments, leading to decreased setup and deployment times, fewer configuration errors, and a diminished risk of security breaches. In this blog post, I would like to demonstrate how you can leverage AWS CodePipeline and AWS Stepfunctions, along with Terraform and Packer, to establish a fully automated pipeline for creating Golden AMIs.

  • Import existing resources into an AWS CloudFormation Stack
    am 30. Oktober 2023

    Presentation Deploying resources with infrastructure as code is the recommended way to provision resources in AWS. The native AWS-way of doing it is by using Cloudformation or CDK (Cloud Development Kit), and you should of course do this from day one. But in real world sometimes somebody provisioned resources via the console, or there is a need of refactor your code and split your stack into multiple stacks. Luckily It is not very often we have cases where it’s required to import resources.

  • Climb the (bed)rock with Python, Javascript and GO
    am 22. Oktober 2023

    Bedrock is now available in eu-central-1. It’s time to get real and use it in applications. Reading all blog posts about Bedrock, you might get the impression that Python and LangChain is the only way to do it. Quite the opposite! As Bedrock makes calling the models available as AWS API, all AWS SDKs are supported! This post shows how to use Bedrock with Python, Javascript and GO.

  • SAP HANA High Availability on AWS - How tecRacer helped secure cash register operations for Germany's leading department store chain
    am 5. Oktober 2023

    Galeria Karstadt Kaufhof and tecRacer have been collaborating on developing Galeria’s Cloud Platform for many years with tecRacer as their Go-To Partner for everything related to AWS. The work we have been doing ranges from designing, setting up and operating their landing zone and network infrastructure, managing platform security and cost optimizations all the way to deploying complex system architectures such as Kubernetes. Most notably, we have been one of their trusted partners when it comes to their SAP infrastructure on AWS and have supported in many successful SAP system deployments.

  • AWS Client VPN - Access your Virtual Private Cloud
    am 20. September 2023

    One of the most unknown options to access a VPC is Client VPN. Nearly all customers I am talking to are using a Bastion Host or similar to access services within their VPC. But what about direct access without any jumps in between? After reading this blog, you can create your own Client VPN.

  • Stop LLM/GenAI hallucination fast: Serverless Kendra RAG with GO
    am 20. September 2023

    RAG is a way to approach the “hallucination” problem with LLM: A contextual reference increases the accuracy of the answers. Do you want to use RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) in production? The Python langchain library may be too slow for your production services. So what about serverless RAG in fast GO Lambda?

  • Teaching boto3 to store floats and datetime objects in DynamoDB
    am 7. September 2023

    In this blog post, we’ll explore how you can teach the DynamoDB Table resource in boto3 (and the client) to store and retrieve Python’s datetime and float objects, which they can’t do natively. We’ll also discuss why you should or shouldn’t do that.

  • Handling Errors and Retries in StepFunctions
    am 28. August 2023

    “Everything fails all the time” has been preached to us by Werner Vogels for a few years now. Every engineer working on building and maintaining systems knows this to be true. Distributed systems come with their own kind of challenges, and one of the AWS services that help deal with those is AWS Step Functions. AWS Step Functions allow you to describe workflows as JSON and will execute those workflows for you. In this blog, we’ll explore what happens when things inevitably go wrong and the options the service offers to perform error handling and retries using an example application.

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tecRacer Group

Vahrenwalder Str. 156
30165 Hannover, Germany

Phone: +49 511 – 59 0 95-950
Fax: +49 511 – 59 0 95-590
E-mail: chef-sales@tecracer.de