First and foremost, if you have this book in your hands, congratulations! You are part of the top talent pool in the IT industry, focusing on systems management and provisioning at scale using powerful automation tools.

I have been in the industry for more than 12 years, implementing and leading next generation platform architecture and engineering efforts in world-class enterprise data centers hosting tens of thousands of servers. Throughout my professional journey, I've had a chance to be part of many paradigm shifts, including virtualization, the cloud era, software-defined data centers, and the latest but not the least, infrastructure as a code.

It was during one of these paradigm shifts when I met the author of this book, Earl Waud. Shortly after meeting, and after spilling a cup of coffee on his notebook, we became very close both professionally and as friends.

Earl has always impressed me with how he cares about people, how he values relationships, while still being very professional, methodical, and self-driven to achieve any goal. Additionally, Earl is not short of innovations, driving them all the way from the back of a napkin into highly available multi-data center production deployments that successfully address today's biggest IT challenges. When you combine these traits with his tremendous experience, it becomes a very effective recipe for success both personally and professionally. Mastering Chef Provisioning is the latest example of that success.

In today's IT world, we are experiencing another paradigm shift. In order to support ever-evolving business needs, traditional IT must adopt critical skillsets around infrastructure automation and orchestration. Although there are numerous automation tools available, many professionals have chosen to use Chef because it is one of the most effective platforms to successfully implement provisioning system automation and orchestration.

One of the fundamentally critical and most repeated functions of IT in mission-critical environments is provisioning compute systems. Because of this, provisioning is one of the major targets of automation in IT. In Mastering Chef Provisioning by Earl Waud, the author clearly depicts how you can strategize, design, and implement provisioning automation with Chef across all major hosting platforms anywhere from your own data center all the way out to Amazon Web Services Public Cloud. With the skillset that you will gain from this book, you will be able to implement your own custom provisioning automation to deliver systems rapidly and accurately for all your business needs.

Considering that we are in the middle of another paradigm shift, Mastering Chef Provisioning is one of the most important references that you can have in your library. As a matter of fact, I have already begun using it as a guideline to aid our provisioning automation efforts in delivering thousands of systems in a very short period of time.

I am very confident that you will enjoy this book, and by mastering the techniques within its pages, you will learn how to provision systems effectively with Chef, saving you tremendous amounts of time in your day-to-day operations and reaffirming your position as part of top talent pool in the IT industry.

I would like to conclude by saying thank you to the author of this book, Earl Waud, for leading the way by setting an example for the rest of the world, both at a professional level and a personal level. "We always win!" my friend.

Mert Cubukcuoglu

Senior Manager, Intuit Inc.