Chef Fundamentals: A Recipe For Automating Infrastructure

Are you the only Chef in the kitchen? Is your infrastructure suffering from snowflake servers? Are you sick and tired of provisioning machines by hand every time you need to put out a fire? Configuring infrastructure shouldn’t be painful, it should be a joy.

Chef is a platform for the DevOps workflow, and is used to automate and manage it all--infrastructure, run-time environments and applications. The most enduring and transformative companies use Chef to become fast, efficient, and innovative software-driven organizations.

Join Robin Beck as he automates everything in this comprehensive introduction to Chef.

Learn to combine resources into recipes, recipes into cookbooks, and transform your infrastructure into code. With Chef we’ll learn to use the power of the Ruby language to eloquently describe the state of a system, whether you’re new to automation or have been administering systems since 1992. We’ll learn how to locally configure a server with the Chef Development Kit, then use the power of a Chef Server to distribute your cookbook to one, or a hundred systems.

This fundamentals class will cover the basics of infrastructure as code. Start by learning about Chef architecture and the tools included in the ChefDK (Chef Development Kit). Then learn how to use a Chef Server to distribute your cookbooks to multiple servers as you push your application to production.

This course has been designed for DevOps engineers wanting to learn Configuration Management with Chef

Operations and Development personnel wanting to become DevOps engineers

Basic knowledge

Before taking this course, we recommend some prior experience writing code. This can be just about any flavor! You don't have to be an expert developer to get started with Chef, and you don't need to be familiar with Ruby

Understand how to use a command-line text editor, like Vi, Emacs or Nano to edit files.

Beginner-level experience navigating a Terminal, such as Powershell or Bash, and using it to perform basic file manipulations

A basic understanding of system administration, such as what it means to install and configure packages and start services

Describe how Configuration Management with Chef is performed.

Be technically savvy in the process of installing and configuring servers in the cloud or in an on-premise datacenter

Gain an understanding of Chef's core components, architecture, terminology and have basic fluency with the most commonly used tools

Be able to utilize and describe Chef terms like Resources, Recipes, Cookbooks, The Chef Server, Roles, Environments, and Data Bags