Become a DevOps Engineer

Chef

This course tackles all the pertinent technical knowledge needed to handle the configuration management tool, Chef.

About the Course

The course discusses how Chef uses a pure-Ruby DSL for what are called "recipes" and its primary purpose of rendering the task of configuring and maintaining company servers with greater efficiency.

The course aims at educating interested professionals wanting to expand their software development and networking specialization into Chef.

Who this Course is for?

This course was created for professionals wanting to learn Chef, especially those who are holding an IT position within a company as the body of technical knowledge allows for these professionals to administer solutions for small and large-scale systems.

Prerequisites

It is recommendable for the professional wanting to take this course on Chef to have the following credentials:

- A Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or equivalent

- A year's worth of experience working as an IT professional

Chef Overview

Chef, part 1 of 6: Intro and Setup

This lesson serves as an overview of the entire course. This introduces learners to the basics of the automation platform called Chef. The learners would be made to understand that this platform functions to transform infrastructure into code. With Chef, all operations such as configuration, deployment, and management across networks are all automated, regardless of size.

This lesson discusses the relationship among the elements of Chef which includes nodes, the server, and workstations, its three main components. 

Chef, part 2 of 6: Chef Client and Ohai

This lesson details the relationship between the Ohai tool and the Chef Client. The discussion details what the Ohai tool is: a tool used for the detection of attributes on a node. Ohai provides the attributes to the chef-client when it starts to run. The learners would be made to understand that the tool is a requirement of the client and should be there on a node. 

The Ohai collects the following attributes:

• CPU data
• Fully qualified domain names
• Host names
• Kernel data
• Memory usage
• Network usage
• Platform details
• Along with other configuration details

Chef, part 3 of 6: Templates and Resources

This lesson discusses the template resource block endemic to Chef. The participants are to learn that this template is responsible for declaring the location wherein a file would be created, the source template for creating the file, and the permissions to access the file. 

Chef, part 4 of 6: Chef Server and Supermarket

This lesson discusses the specifics about the Chef Server and the Supermarket. The latter is discussed in full, as the learners would find out that the Chef Supermarket pertains to the community cookbooks website. The discussion goes into the specifics of how the Chef Supermarket is used.

Chef, part 5 of 6: Managing Nodes and Roles

This lesson goes into the details of what Nodes and Roles are and how these are used and managed. 

This discussion would define nodes as any machine that may be physical or virtual that is being managed by Chef.

Roles are defined as the category in Chef that describes the function that a machine should be performing, its responsibilities, and the software and settings that it should be delegated with.

Chef, part 6 of 6: Environments and Data Bags

This lesson details the environment and the Data Bags that can be loaded by a cookbook. 

In the discussion, Chef Data Bags pertain to a collection of data that is arbitrary and can be used with cookbooks.  The learners would be made to understand that the Data Bags are wholly helpful when one prefers not to use attributes considered hardcore in recipes.