5 Reasons to Learn Chef

DevOps is bridging the gap between SysAdmins and developers and is becoming more popular (and more important) as organizations evolve and scale to massive data centers. Chef is a powerful piece of software that can revolutionize the way your data center functions.

Trainer Shawn Powers recently started creating videos for his "Chef Fundamentals" course, so we asked him to share his top reasons that you should learn this powerful, popular technology.

Shawn's Top 5 Reasons to Learn Chef:

1. Configuring servers is robot work. Gone are the days when it made sense to spend hours configuring individual servers for your environment. With cloud scalability, it's not uncommon to deploy and destroy a hundred servers in a single day. With Chef, those servers can be configured exactly how you want them, automatically. Let Chef do the dirty work!

2. Get version control for your hardware. We're all familiar with different versions of applications. With Chef, you can use those same developer concepts to provide incremental versions of your hardware configurations. Did the 1.3 update to your web server configurations break eCommerce? Revert all your servers to 1.2 with a simple Chef command.

3. You want to take up extreme sports! With the traditional system administration methodology, if the SysAdmin was hit by a bus, it took months for a new employee to figure out the system. If your configurations are managed and controlled by Chef, you can take up Caribbean Shark Fighting and not worry about your inevitable replacement figuring out your system!

4. Use other people's work. The Chef community has tons of recipes and cookbooks, which are Chef-speak for configuration automation scripts. Why do the work of configuring Chef to manage your Apache server farm when someone else has already done it and shared the results with the world? (And in your spare time, you can pay it forward and submit your own cookbooks!)

5. You want to see your family. Chef allows a small team to accomplish an enormous amount of infrastructure management with minimal effort. When you can spin up 50 database servers in 10 minutes, it means you can make it home in time for dinner. While it's still hot.

Chef can simplify the way you perform infrastructure automation and configuration management tasks. It's a way to administer your IT infrastructure from your desktop computer. It's important to have a clear understanding of what Chef is, what it does, how it does it, and most importantly how to best utilize it in your environment.

Ready to get cooking? Start watching Shawn's "Chef Fundamentals" course, now in progress.

{Editor's note: The upcoming IT Cloud Computing Conference will have DevOps and cloud training, including topics such as Chef! Find out more.}