Chef Certified study guide
Chef Certified · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
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 study guide has 4 sections and about 1,844 words.
01Chef Automation and Infrastructure Management
This domain tests the Chef Infra architecture and the automation loop: how a workstation-authored cookbook becomes a converged node through the Chef Infra Server. Expect questions on the roles of Workstation, Server, and Client, the compile/converge lifecycle, resource idempotence, attribute precedence, and the Policyfile model that replaces roles and environments.
515 words, about 3 min02Infrastructure Management
This domain covers day-2 operations: registering and scheduling nodes, promoting cookbook versions through environments or policy groups, managing secrets and data bags, and troubleshooting the server and client. Questions tend to be operational rather than authoring-focused.
476 words, about 2 min03Compliance Management
This domain tests InSpec and Chef's compliance reporting: writing profiles, running them against targets, reading results, and handling exceptions without hiding risk. It is about expressing security and configuration policy as executable code, then proving it continuously.
428 words, about 2 min04Job Orchestration
This domain covers coordinating work across many nodes and environments: on-demand Chef Infra Client runs, remote execution from Chef Workstation, Chef Automate pipelines, and Habitat-driven service deployment. The exam tests which tool is appropriate for fan-out, rolling change, and artifact promotion.
425 words, about 2 min