There are at least three great reasons for you to join us at CloudOpen in San Diego next week. First, our very own CTO, Christopher Brown, will be a keynote speaker on Friday, August 31st. Second, we’ll be hosting our popular Chef Introductory Workshop as a Co-Located Event on Tuesday, August 28th. And perhaps the most exciting reason to join us is that we’re offering this great workshop at a special rate of $75!

Click here to sign up now and secure your spot!

(If you are already signed up for CloudOpen itself, you can add the workshop here)

CloudOpen 2012 | Opscode Chef Workshop

Opscode Chef Infrastructure Automation Workshop

Tuesday, August 28, 9am-5pm

Opscode Chef™ is an automation platform for developers and system engineers to continuously define, build, and manage infrastructure. Chef brings the benefits of configuration management to the entire infrastructure, enabling full-stack automation and system integration. Chef is an open source project that has hundreds of individual and corporate contributors, who have shared best practices for automation. We will show you how to put these together to solve real problems.

The Chef Infrastructure Automation Workshop is a hands-on training class for getting students familiar with Chef in automating common tasks. This workshop will guide the students through hands-on examples and exercises that they can follow along, while learning the basics of how Chef works and achieve success.

The exercises will cover:

• How to set up a local workstation with Chef and connect to a Chef Server
• Ways to automate web services  with a real world example
• Automating user management, and privileged access with sudo
• Common system services such as NTP and SMTP consistently
• Using Chef’s built-in tools and APIs to interact with the Chef Server

Each exercise is instructor-led, and introduces new Chef concepts at each stage. Important in depth topics are explained, including Anatomy of a Chef Run, Chef’s Authentication Cycle, how to build roles to describe nodes, how to manipulate configuration dynamically through discovered data, searching for information from the Chef Server using its API, and more. Join us in this workshop and learn the basics of Chef to set you on a path of victory for your organization.

Workshop Registration (US$75):

If you are attending LinuxCon North America or CloudOpen, and would like to add the Opscode Chef Workshop to your registration, click here. To register for the Opscode Chef Workshop only, click here.

General Requirements

• Students must be familiar with basic to intermediate Unix/Linux system administration topics including the following:
• Command-line familiarity with Unix/Linux shells
• System resource concepts like package, service and user management
• Key-based authentication (e.g., RSA/SSH)
• Version control systems (e.g., Git, Mercurial, Subversion)
• Knowledge of cloud computing or virtualization concepts such as API-driven compute is helpful

Students should have basic working knowledge with at least one third generation programming language such as Perl, Python, PHP or Ruby.

• Basic data structures (string, numbers, array, hash or language equivalents)
• Conditionals (if/unless, case/switch)
• Loops (for/foreach, while, or language equivalents)

Workstation Requirements
Attendees should bring a wifi-enabled laptop to the workshop. Install non-Chef software before the workshop starts.

• SSH/SCP (OpenSSH, puTTY/WinSCP or equivalent)
• Programer’s text editor (Vi/Vim, Emacs, TextMate or equivalent)

The following operating systems have been tested as workstation systems with the hands on exercises:

• Ubuntu 10.04, 12.04
• Fedora 16
• Mac OS X 10.7.3
• Windows 7

Other platforms and platform versions may work without modification. Please contact Joshua Timberman at joshua@opscode.com with workstation questions.