Chef Fluency badge Exam: May 2018 Update

Chef…Chef..Chef!!!
Chef has become a must know tool for every infrastructure person in the new DevOps oriented world that we live in.

Recently, I got the chance to start working extensively with Chef and I must say it is actually really Fun!! Once you get familiar with all the Kitchen terms (Pun intended), you will realize how strong and a simple tool it is.

So after working for a few months with Chef, I decided to go ahead and get certified. Now to get fully certified with Chef, you have to start taking a few badges and then you get a certification. Full Details here: https://training.chef.io/certification.

So I registered for the exam a week ago after going through the Linux Academy training and doing the Mock exam which consisted of 30 MCQ questions and according . Linux Academy will also give you coupon to get a 10% discount.

The exam is an online proctored exam that you can even take on the weekends. On the exam day, after the proctor has made me show him my whole messy house to make sure no one else is in the room with me, I get ready to start the exam thinking that it should be a breeze since its just a few MCQ questions. But here comes the surprise, the first page of the exam states that “THE FORMAT HAS CHANGED” for the exam and that there is some hands-on activities along with MCQs and the allotted time is now 90 minutes instead of 60 minutes. After a few minutes of shock, I realized that well if l fail, at least I know how the exam is going to be and I will get to write a blog post about it.

So here is how the new format looks like, You get access to an Ubuntu Virtual machine with the exam open on a browser tab along with … wait  for it …… the Chef documentation!! This was a very pleasant surprise, you can use the Chef documentation throughout the exam for any questions, MCQs or hands on questions. ChefDK is installed on the machine along with a knife.rb file that is connecting to some Cloud hosted Chef Server. You will need to open the Terminal Window to start playing around with Chef and Atom the text editor is also installed.

I won’t be sharing any of the questions with you but overall it was a very fun exam and I feel like it really tests your basic chef skills. The hands-on questions consisted of things like:

• Add a Runlist to a node.
• FQDN of a node that has a certain role.
• What is the name of the Key being used to authenticate to the Chef server.
• Use the Knife command to find out how many nodes are there.

and as I mentioned you can use the Chef documentation to assist you with all this. There were of course a few Chef Automate MCQ questions along with the other questions that you will see on the Linux Academy Mock exam.

The exam took a while since I had forgot a few commands and had to roam the documentation for them but after completing the exam you do not get your results right away. You get a message stating that it might take up to 5 days for you to get the results, but I got my results 7 hours later on a Sunday. The email stated that WOOT WOOT passed and also stated that you need 70% to pass the exam.

It was a really fun experience and I am looking forward to my next badge. Please feel free to leave any questions in the comments section.