Book excerpt: Learn Chef Provisioning like a boss and discover how to deploy software and manage hosts, along with engaging recipes to automate your cloud and server infrastructure with Chef. About This Book Leverage the power of Chef to transform your infrastructure into code to deploy new features in minutes Get step-by-step instructions to configure, deploy, and scale your applications Master specific Chef techniques to run an entire fleet of machines without breaking a sweat. Who This Book Is For If you are a system administrator, Linux administrator, a cloud developer, or someone who just wants to learn and apply Chef automation to your existing or new infrastructure, then this learning path will show you all you need to know. In order to get the most out of this learning path, some experience of programming or scripting languages would be useful. What You Will Learn Install Chef server on your own hosts Integrate Chef with cloud services Debug your cookbooks and Chef runs using the numerous inspection and logging facilities of Chef Extend Chef to meet your advanced needs by creating custom plugins for Knife and Ohai Create a perfect model system Use the best test-driven development methodologies In Detail Chef is a configuration management tool that turns IT infrastructure into code. Chef provides tools to manage systems at scale. This learning path takes you on a comprehensive tour of Chef's functionality, ranging from its core features to advanced development. You will be brought up to speed with what's new in Chef and how to set up your own Chef infrastructure for individuals, or small or large teams. You will learn to use the basic Chef command-line tools. We will also take you through the core concepts of managing users, applications, and your entire cloud infrastructure. You will learn the techniques of the pros by walking you through a host of step-by-step guides to solve real-world infrastructure automation challenges.You will learn to automate and document every aspect of your network, from the hardware to software, middleware, and all your containers. You will become familiar with the Chef'sProvisioning tool. By the end of this course, you will be confident in how to manage your infrastructure, scale using the cloud, and extend the built-in functionality of Chef itself.The books used in this Learning Path are: 1) Chef Essentials 2) Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook – Second Edition 3) Mastering Chef Provisioning Style and approach This fast-paced guide covers the many facets of Chef and will teach administrators to use Chef as a birds-eye lens for their entire system. This book takes you through a host of step-by-step guides to solve real-world infrastructure automation challenges and offers elegant, time-saving solutions for a perfectly described and automated network.