Chef is a configuration management technology developed by Opscode to manage infrastructure on physical or virtual machines. It is an open source developed using Ruby, which helps in managing complex infrastructure on the fly. This tutorial provides a basic understanding of the infrastructure and fundamental concepts of managing an infrastructure using Chef.

Audience

This tutorial has been prepared for those who want to understand the features and functionality of Chef and how Chef can help in reducing the complexity of managing an infrastructure.

After completing this tutorial one would have moderate level understanding of Chef and its key building blocks. It will also give a fair idea on how to configure Chef in a preconfigured infrastructure and how to use it.

Prerequisites

We assume anyone who wants to learn Chef should have an understanding of system administration, infrastructure and network protocol communication. To automate the infrastructure provisioning, one should have a command over basic Ruby script writing and the underlying system where one wants to use Chef.