Course Content
Get started with Chef by taking official Chef training. It’s a two-day instructor-led course that covers all the basics. You’ll learn what it means to turn infrastructure into code so that you can automate the configuration, deployment, and management of your servers. You’ll also learn about Chef architecture and the set of tools included in the Chef Development Kit (ChefDK). Finally, we’ll show you how to test your infrastructure code so that you can deploy with confidence. Each of the core units includes hands-on exercises that will give you confidence in your new skills. At the end of the course, you’ll come away with a repo and the skills to start automating your own infrastructure.
Who should attend
- IT Managers and Leaders
- Developers and Application Teams
- System Administrators
- IT Operations Staff
- Release Engineers
- Configuration Managers
- Anyone involved with IT infrastructure
- ScrumMasters
- Software Managers and Team Leads
Prerequisites
Students who have completed the self-paced Fundamentals of DevOps eLearning course have found it very helpful when completing this course.
Course Objectives
- Use Chef Resources to define the state of your system
- Write and use Chef recipes and cookbooks
- Automate testing of cookbooks
- Manage multiple nodes with Chef Server
- Create Organizations
- Bootstrap nodes
- Assign Roles to nodes
- Deploy nodes to environments
- Enable Chef’s search features with your automation
- Create acceptance and production environments
Outline: Chef Essentials Workshop - Official Chef Training (CHEFBC)
Chef Introduction
- Overview and expectations for the class
- The Chef Lab System Architecture
Group lab: Pre-built workstation
2. Using Chef Resources
- Using Chef to install packages on your virtual workstation
- Using the chef-client command
- Creating a basic Chef recipe file
- Defining Chef Resources
- Test and repair
Lab: The 'file' resource
3. Building Cookbooks
- Modify a recipe
- Collaboration and version control
- Generating a Chef cookbook
- Defining a Chef recipe that sets up a web server
Group exercise: Version Control
Lab: Set up Git
Lab: Setting up web servers
4. Chef client
- Locally applying multiple cookbooks' recipes with chef-client
- Applying a run list
- Including a recipe from within another recipe
Lab: Update the apache Cookbook
5. Testing Cookbooks
- Using Test Kitchen to verify your recipes converge on a virtual instance
- Reading the ServerSpec documentation
- Writing and execute tests
- Where do tests live?
Group exercise: Test configuration
Lab: Converge the kitchen
Lab: Commit your work Lab: Testing Apache
6. Details About a System
- Managing large numbers of servers
- Capturing details about a system
- Using the node object within a recipe
- Using Ruby's string interpolation
- Updating the version of a cookbook
Lab: Update the Cookbook version
Lab: Node Details in the Webserver
Lab: Commit your work
7. Desired State and Data
- Cleaner recipes
- When to use a template resource
- Creating a template file
- Using ERB tags to display node data in a template
- Defining a template resource
- Using kitchen test on the "apache" cookbook
- Using chef-clientto apply the "apache" cookbook's "default" recipe
- Updating the "apache" cookbook's version for this patch=
- Committing the changes
Lab: Update the version
8. Local Workstation Installation
- Installing ChefDK on your laptop
- Executing commands to ensure everything is installed
- Installing a local editor like Atom
Lab: You will run the following commands and report their versions: $chef, $chef-client, $knife, $ohai, $berks, $kitchen, $foodcritic, $rubocop
9. The Chef Server
- Connecting to a Chef Server
- Managing Additional systems
- Managing User traffic
- Uploading cookbooks to a Chef Server
- Bootstrapping a node
- Managing a node via a Chef Server
- Hosted Chef
Lab: Uploading cookbooks and managing cookbook dependencies
10. Community Cookbooks
- Find cookbooks on the Chef supermarket
- Create a wrapper cookbook
- Example: load balancer
- Amazon EC2 instances
- Replace the existing default values
- Upload a cookbook to Chef Server
- Bootstrap a new node that runs the cookbook
Discussion: Can your teams benefit from the supermarket?
11. Managing Multiple Nodes
- Managing user traffic
- Bootstrapping and updating the run_list
- Running chef-client on a node
- Appending values to an attribute within a recipe
- Versioning cookbooks and uploading to Chef Server
Lab: Another new node
Lab: Test and update the load balancer
Lab: Run $berks install
Lab: Converging the cookbook
12. Roles
- Assigning, defining, and configuring
- The 'knife' role
- Verifying roles
- Roles for everyone
Lab: Define a web role
13. Search
- Update a Cookbook to Dynamically Use Nodes with the Web Role
- Describe the query syntax used in search
- Build a search into your recipe code
- Create a Ruby Array and Ruby Hash
- Update the myhaproxy wrapper cookbook
Lab: Updating, load balancing, uploading and running the new search-capable cookbook
14. Environments
- Keeping your infrastructure current
- Creating a production environment
- Creating an acceptance environment
- Deploying a node to an environment
- Updating a search query to be more exact
Lab: Set new nodes to production Lab: Acceptance environment
Lab: Create a new environment file
15. Course wrap and further resources
- Beyond essentials
- Valuable reading
- Events and online resources
- Customizing Chef