Chef Certified case studies
Chef Certified · Put your knowledge to work in context.
The Chef Certified credential is intended for DevOps engineers, platform engineers, and infrastructure automation practitioners who work with Progress Chef products to configure, audit, orchestrate, and scale infrastructure. Chef is now part of the Progress product portfolio, and its platform is offered as SaaS, on-premises, and through marketplaces such as AWS and Azure. The exam domains mirror the capabilities Progress groups under the Chef 360 platform: Chef Automation and Infrastructure Management, Infrastructure Management, Compliance Management, and Job Orchestration - each weighted 25 percent in this profile. That means no single domain can carry a passing result; candidates should be equally comfortable writing and standardizing infrastructure configuration, running compliance audits against standards-based content, and orchestrating workflows across disparate DevOps tools from a single control plane. The Chef Certified case studies are 5 cases and about 3,852 words.
1Rolling out an nginx cookbook bump across a heterogeneous production fleet
Your team manages 420 nodes with Chef Infra Server 14. Two environments exist: staging (30 nodes) and production (390).
802 words, about 4 min2Chef search as load balancer membership during autoscaling
You operate 1,150 nodes across us-east-1, eu-west-1, and ap-southeast-2. A runbook rebuilds the external load balancer target group by running search(:node, 'role:web AND chef environment:production') and then calling the cloud API.
837 words, about 4 min3CIS benchmark waivers when a legacy application requires root SSH
You manage compliance for 800 RHEL 7 nodes using an InSpec CIS Level 1 profile executed through Chef Automate. Fourteen percent of nodes fail control sshd-05 because a legacy application requires PermitRootLogin yes on 112 nodes.
731 words, about 4 min4Rolling restart orchestration for a 180-node Java web tier
You manage a 180-node Java web tier behind an AWS ALB. Each node must be drained from the target group, allowed 120 seconds for in-flight requests, restarted, and returned to service only after /health returns 200 for five consecutive checks.
753 words, about 4 min5Test Kitchen matrix explosion and a flaky artifact dependency
The app deploy cookbook supports Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 20.04, and CentOS 7, with Chef Infra Client 14 and 15. Test Kitchen currently defines 4 suites x 3 platforms x 2 Chef versions = 24 instances.
729 words, about 4 min