Getting Productive with Chef Cookbooks

Course Overview

(Please note the following content is from the official provider.)
Using Chef to define and configure your systems requires an understanding of what's possible as well as the tools you will have at your disposal. In this course, you will learn the fundamentals to develop configuration management solutions with Chef.
Because this course builds on the Planning & Installing Chef course, the viewer will already have a functional Chef lab environment, or at least have the capacity to create one. In that course, we focused on the end result, and the Chef recipes and cookbooks we created in Planning & Installing Chef were purposefully quick and dirty, and did not adhere to any kind of development standards. However, this would not work in the day-to-day life of a Chef administrator, where robust, repeatable code is the critical foundation of reliable infrastructure and application configuration. In order to achieve this, in this course we will develop Chef cookbooks designed to configure pre-existing Windows 2012 R2 Server and Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS systems with a fully-functional web application with database backend (IIS/SQL and Apache/MySQL respectively). These cookbooks will consist of code we build ourselves, as well as, community cookbooks from the Opscode Marketplace. We will then use Test Kitchen and Vagrant to test our cookbooks in a dynamically-created test environment to make sure they are solid, before uploading the code in to production to be applied against our live servers.
(Please note that we obtained the following content based on information that users may want to know, such as skills, applicable scenarios, future development, etc., combined with AI tools, and have been manually reviewed)
What skills and knowledge will you acquire during this course?
This course will provide learners with the skills and knowledge to use Chef to define and configure their systems. Learners will gain an understanding of the fundamentals of developing configuration management solutions with Chef, including how to create robust, repeatable code that is the foundation of reliable infrastructure and application configuration. They will also learn how to build Chef cookbooks to configure pre-existing Windows 2012 R2 Server and Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS systems with a fully-functional web application with database backend (IIS/SQL and Apache/MySQL respectively). Additionally, learners will gain the skills to use Test Kitchen and Vagrant to test their cookbooks in a dynamically-created test environment to make sure they are solid before uploading the code into production. Finally, learners will acquire the knowledge to apply their cookbooks against live servers.

How does this course contribute to professional growth?
This course provides learners with the opportunity to gain valuable knowledge and skills in the area of configuration management with Chef. Through this course, learners will gain an understanding of the fundamentals of developing configuration management solutions with Chef, including how to create robust, repeatable code that is the foundation of reliable infrastructure and application configuration. Additionally, learners will learn how to build Chef cookbooks to configure pre-existing Windows 2012 R2 Server and Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS systems with a fully-functional web application with database backend (IIS/SQL and Apache/MySQL respectively). Furthermore, learners will learn how to use Test Kitchen and Vagrant to test their cookbooks in a dynamically-created test environment to make sure they are solid before uploading the code into production. This course will provide learners with the skills and knowledge necessary to apply their cookbooks against live servers, thus contributing to their professional growth.

Is this course suitable for preparing further education?
This course is suitable for preparing further education as it provides learners with the fundamentals of developing configuration management solutions with Chef. Learners will gain knowledge on how to create robust, repeatable code that is the foundation of reliable infrastructure and application configuration. Additionally, they will learn how to build Chef cookbooks to configure pre-existing Windows 2012 R2 Server and Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS systems with a fully-functional web application with database backend (IIS/SQL and Apache/MySQL respectively). Furthermore, they will learn how to use Test Kitchen and Vagrant to test their cookbooks in a dynamically-created test environment to make sure they are solid before uploading the code into production.