I am only knowledgeable of the chef world and aws so my advice reflects that. Get a free opscode, github and aws account. (The aws account is pretty limited at

I am only knowledgeable of the chef world and aws so my advice reflects that. Get a free opscode, github and aws account. (The aws account is pretty limited at the free tier so I would probably just spin up small instances and kill them after I was done "practicing".) Follow along a chef tutorial such as: https://learnchef.opscode.com/starter-use-cases/wordpress/ https://learnchef.opscode.com/starter-use-cases/wordpress/ or https://learnchef.opscode.com/starter-use-cases/multi-node-ec2/ https://learnchef.opscode.com/starter-use-cases/multi-node-e... You should definitely have your own servers to play around with. I use digital ocean which is pretty inexpensive but has an API to your account (example: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-install-chef-and-ruby-with-rvm-on-a-ubuntu-vps https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-insta...). I would look into using vagrant to spin up virtual machines associated with a particular software project. I find that helped me quite a bit with thinking of the server as being coupled to the application server software.