When looking at bootstrapping an infrastructure, people opt either for taking, or creating full images of an existing environment , or for “scripting” automated installations. Both have their advantages and disadvantages.

More from Agile Testing’s Grig Gheorghiu on setting up Opscode Chef, creating your own cookbook, modifying an existing cookbook, creating a role and adding a client machine to that role.

The core definition of “fully automated provisioning”: the ability to deploy, update, and repair your application infrastructure using only pre-defined automated procedures.

A checklist for security and performance tweaks you’ll want to apply when building a new Ubuntu box to host Drupal sites. Most of these will apply to CentOS as well, but the package names may be slightly different.

Agile Testing’s Grig Gheorghiu provides a simple, step-by-step tutorial for installing Opscode Chef and getting a Chef client to talk to a Chef server.