Chef Fundamental & Advanced Training — Enterprise Configuration Management at Scale

What This Course Covers

This comprehensive program combines Chef fundamentals and advanced topics into a single, accelerated curriculum. It covers the full Chef ecosystem — Infra, InSpec, Automate, Habitat — from writing your first cookbook through operating Chef Server at enterprise scale. The course includes a dedicated modernization module covering Chef→Ansible migration patterns and coexistence strategies. Designed for enterprises that need engineers who can both maintain existing Chef infrastructure AND plan its evolution.

Who Should Attend

• New DevOps engineers joining organizations with Chef infrastructure
• Experienced Chef users wanting to deepen their Chef Server and InSpec knowledge
• Engineering managers overseeing Chef→Ansible or Chef→immutable-infra migration
• Compliance engineers leveraging InSpec for continuous compliance

Learning Outcomes

• Write production-grade Chef cookbooks and custom resources (fundamental)
• Operate Chef Server at scale — multi-org, RBAC, policyfiles, data bags (advanced)
• Build comprehensive test suites with Test Kitchen, ChefSpec, and InSpec (advanced)
• Implement Chef Automate for visibility, compliance, and workflow automation (advanced)
• Integrate Chef with Jenkins/GitHub Actions for CI/CD-driven infrastructure (advanced)
• Design and execute Chef→Ansible migration strategies (modernization)

Course Modules

1. Chef Architecture & Setup — Client-server model. Workstation, Chef Server, nodes. knife, Ohai. Bootstrap.
2. Cookbook Development — Resources, recipes, attributes, templates, libraries. Best practices.
3. Testing Chef — Test Kitchen. ChefSpec (unit). InSpec integration tests. CI pipeline for cookbooks.
4. Custom Resources & Libraries — Writing custom resources. Helper libraries. Ohai plugins.
5. Chef Server at Scale — Multi-org. RBAC. Policyfiles vs. roles/environments. Solr search. Scaling Chef Server.
6. Data Bags & Secrets — Encrypted data bags. Chef Vault. Secrets management patterns. HashiCorp Vault integration.
7. InSpec Deep Dive — Profile development. CIS benchmarks. Waivers. InSpec in CI/CD. Reporting. Automate integration.
8. Chef Automate — Dashboard. Compliance reporting. Event feed. Workflow automation. Node management.
9. Chef in CI/CD Pipelines — Jenkins + Chef. GitHub Actions + Chef. Automated cookbook promotion. Environment pipelines.
10. Habitat Overview — Application automation. Builder. Supervisor. Habitat vs. containers. Current state of the project.
11. Modernization & Migration — Chef to Ansible mapping. Incremental migration patterns. Coexistence. When to migrate.
12. Capstone: Enterprise Chef Operations — Operate a multi-org Chef deployment with CI/CD, compliance automation, and a migration roadmap.

Hands-on Exercises (18 total)

Write cookbooks for Linux and Windows configuration. Build Test Kitchen suites with multiple platforms. Create InSpec compliance profiles for CIS benchmarks. Configure Chef Server organizations with RBAC. Build a Jenkins pipeline for cookbook testing and promotion. Plan a Chef→Ansible migration with module-by-module mapping.

Enterprise Use Cases

• Operating Chef at scale for a 3,000+ server financial services infrastructure
• Using InSpec for continuous PCI-DSS compliance scanning with automated evidence collection
• Planning incremental Chef→Ansible migration while maintaining production stability

Related Courses

For migration targets, see Ansible Training. See also Chef Training (shorter fundamentals-only version) and Platform Engineering.