The document introduces Chef and EC2 as a way to automate server configuration and deployment. It discusses the traditional process of manually provisioning, installing operating systems, and configuring servers (provisioning, bootstrapping, configuring, command and control). This becomes inefficient at scale. Chef allows defining server configurations as code via resources, recipes and cookbooks, eliminating manual steps and speeding deployment. The document concludes with a promise to demonstrate Chef's capabilities in a live demo.