How your Chef skills can help you
Opscode Chef (or just Chef) is a configuration management tool written in Ruby and Erlang and uses a pure Ruby DSL (domain specific language) for writing ‘recipes’ (system configurations) – hence the name Chef. It was built with the Cloud infrastructure in mind integrating with all types of Cloud provider and allows you to standardise and automate deployment and configuration of servers and applications as part of DevOps processes.
Tools such as Chef address modern day IT challenges in building and managing high speed companies whilst also allowing for constant improvement and collaboration between different IT departments and therefore have fingers in both the technology and culture pies. The idea behind these tools is to ultimately help organisations be more flexible, faster, efficient and safe whilst also saving money.
Chef is currently the number two DevOps tool but is neck and neck with Puppet whilst Docker has surged into the lead recently. The advantages of using Chef over Puppet seem to be that Chef has an impressive catalogue of well-known companies using its automation and a large community of users ready to help due to its maturity and the fact that it’s been around since 2009. That maturity also means that it is very stable and less risky. It is centred around Git for its configuration and deployments and therefore has great version control capability and is cross platform covering Linux, Windows and *nix.
If you want to start learning Chef then you’re going to need to know Ruby as there are no other languages that can be used to configure it. And even if you do know Ruby there is still a steep learning curve to using Chef in comparison to Puppet which makes it hard for non-developer staff like System Administrators.
Learning Chef does seem worth it however as the DevOps market is booming and demand for Chef skills has risen 17% for permanent roles this year with salaries increasing by 4.35% too. Contract demand has risen 7% and day rates by 11% although 67% of the current jobs out there are permanent.