Top 21 Chef Interview Questions and Answers for DevOps Engineers

DevOps engineers need to be proficient in technical and interpersonal skills, teamwork, and problem-solving techniques. In addition, they must be able to interact and collaborate successfully with coworkers from all backgrounds and disciplines since they work closely with several teams within the business. A Recipe is a collection of Resources which is used for configuring a piece of software. It is installed on each node which is required to configure the node to its desired state.

An environment is a way to map an organization’s real-life workflow to what can be configured and managed when using Chef server. Every organization begins with a single environment called the _default environment, which cannot be modified (or deleted). Additional environments can be created to reflect each organization’s patterns and workflow. Before talking about the growing popularity of DevOps, discuss the current industry scenario.

Talk about a project you completed successfully.

You can directly mention the command to upload a cookbook to the Chef server “knife cookbook upload”. It is used for production purposes where you typically run Chef-client to apply one or more cookbooks. However, one possible drawback of such an environment is that one person’s flaws impact the whole team, and there can be occasional conflicts. Interviewees should speak candidly about such issues to demonstrate their experience with a DevOps culture. “DevOps managers and teams are looking for people who have a passion for the work, are self-driven, and can work independently,” Arif says.

A Dockerfile has all the properties, permissions, libraries, and configuration a particular software requires to run. This Dockerfile provides a ‘container image’ which can be run on a ‘container host’. This container image can be run on the developer's system, tester’s system, and production environment. A Version Control System(VCS) stores, tracks, and helps in managing the different versions of the code or files.

Most Common Chef Interview Questions and Answers

A playbook serves as a blueprint for automating IT infrastructure, including operating systems, Kubernetes platforms, security systems and network components. Playbooks are written in YAML script and can be used to program server nodes, applications, services and other devices. Continuous deployment takes CD to the next level by having new changes in code integrated and delivered automatically into the release branch. More specifically, as soon as the updates pass all stages of the production pipeline, they are deployed directly to the end-user without human intervention. Thus, to successfully utilize continuous deployment, the software artifacts must go through rigorously established automated tests and tools before being deployed into the production environment.

Certain example questions are composed by masters of SVR Technologies that trains for DevOps Training to grant you a view of a variety of questions which may be proposed in an interview. We have taken full care to give accurate answers to all the questions. Passionate about driving product growth, Shivam has managed key AI and IOT based products across different business functions.

Chef Interview Questions Magazine

A) Use the driver create subcommand to create a new Kitchen driver in the RubyGems project. A) The chef_mirror resource to mirror objects in the chef-repo to a specified location. A) Signed header authentication is used to validate communications between the Chef server and any node that is being managed by the Chef server. The Chef client is installed on each node and is used to configure the node to its desired state.

Virtualization is creating a virtual version of something, such as a server, storage device, or network. In DevOps, virtualization allows teams to create and manage virtual environments that can be used for development, testing, and deployment. This can help improve efficiency, reduce costs, and enable greater flexibility and scalability. DevOps is all about continuous testing throughout the process, starting with development through to production. This ensures that developers are delivering code that doesn’t have any errors and is of high quality, and it also helps everyone leverage their time most effectively. DevOps engineers almost always work in a 24/7 business critical online environment.

What is a merge conflict in Git, and how can it be resolved?

A) A node is any machine—physical, virtual, cloud, network device, etc.—that is under management by Chef. For example, in this lesson, you used a template resource to manage your HTML home page from an external file. The recipe stated the configuration policy for your web site, and the template file contained the data. You used a cookbook to package both parts up into a single unit that you can later deploy. Make sure you demonstrate your perfect understanding of both development and operations.

• In this configuration, a virtual machine monitor (VMM), or hypervisor, has full control of the physical machine’s hardware resources.
• Automation testing is done to check whether quality standards for functionality (business logic),  code style, and user experience have been met.
• This commercial-grade tool offers extended insight into network traffic and IT infrastructure.
• The transition to DevOps requires a complete reshaping of your software development culture, including the workflow, organizational structure as well as infrastructure.

These two products are Elasticsearch(database for data) and Logstash(collects, parses, and stores logs). DevOps is more of an organizational and cultural approach that promotes collaboration and communication between both the chef devops certification engineering and operation teams. It only means that their working environment and required expertise are changing. Therefore, their main focus should be to professionally evolve in order to keep up with this maturing trend.

Puppet Tutorial – DevOps Tool For Configuration Management

A) the dnf_package resource to install, upgrade, and remove packages with DNF for Fedora platforms. The dnf_package resource is able to resolve provides data for packages much like DNF can do when it is run from the command line. This allows a variety of options for installing packages, like minimum versions, virtual provides, and library names. A) The chef_handler resource is used to enable handlers during a chef-client run. The chef is a device applied to Configuration Management and is exactly competing with Puppet. If you wanna remain above on the hog on your Chef interview, believe if this blog on Chef Interview Questions is the solution to solving your interview.

Use the converge and verify subcommands during the normal the day-to-day development of a cookbook. With it, you can easily depend on community cookbooks and have them safely included in your workflow. A) The chef_organization resource to interact with organization objects that exist on the Chef server. A) chef_group resource is used to interact with group objects that exist on the Chef server. A) chef_container resource is used to interact with container objects that exist on the Chef server. A) Use the cab_package resource to install or remove Microsoft Windows cabinet (.cab) packages.

Which command is used to generate a recipe in the /recipes directory ?

I believe to practice defensive programming in a pragmatic way, which often means assuming that the code will fail and planning for those failures. I try to incorporate unit test strategy, use of test harnesses, early load testing; network simulation, A/B and multi-variate testing, etc. Once you are prepared with the above Chef interview questions then your dream job is not far. Remember, you have mentioned the word Recipe in your previous answer, so the next question in this Chef interview questions blog has to be related to Recipe.

• Because of its popularity, candidates should be familiar with how Selenium fits into DevOps and the types of testing it supports.
• Additionally, in case of any conflict or failure, the code can be reverted using the VCS.
• At the end of the day, hiring remains an art, a science — and a lot of work.
• But DevOps moves such tasks toward the left end, that is, sooner in the development process.
• With continuous deployment, developers can focus solely on the product because their final task in the pipeline is to review pull requests and merge them to the master branch.