Michelin Starred Cooking with Chef

Opscode’s Chef is a reasonably new system at 2 years old and hasn’t yet matured to have the established best practices and base of reference materials of Ops staples such as Apache, PostgreSQL and so forth.

This talk is designed for intermediate Chef users, who are comfortable with the building blocks of Chef such as roles, cookbooks, environments et al, and aims to equip them with ideas, best practices and thinking patterns to help them get more out of Chef, and build a dependable and resilient Chef infrastructure.

I’ll talk about some techniques and approaches for making Chef less intimidating and easier to learn for both intermediate and advanced users. I’ll look at getting under the hood and figuring out the nuts and bolts of Chef through both a critical approach and experimentation, and delve into the Chef source code without a safety harness with real world examples of how to write Knife plugins

I’ll also demonstrate some best practices we’ve identified at Etsy and how we’ve made Chef a comfortable, essential part of our Engineering team’s workflow.

The main topics covered will be:

• Familiarity and Understanding – Building resilient and dependable Chef infrastructures isn’t just cookbooks and recipes. Building a team around it is equally important. I’ll look at the importance of helping the entire team to work with Chef, be comfortable with it, and understand it inside and out.

• Critical Approach & Experimentation – Don’t take Opscode’s word for it. If you don’t like it, change it. This section will look at experimenting with and changing workflows in Chef and rapidly learning while doing so, with real world examples of what we’ve done to get Chef to fit our workflows at Etsy.

• Use the Source – This section will show that diving into Chef’s source code is nothing to be afraid of, and is in fact one of its most valuable learning resources. I’ll demonstrate this with Plugin 101, showing how to write a useful Knife plugin from scratch.

• Best Practices from Etsy – Some of the Chef best practices we make use of at Etsy and why we think they’re a good way to do things.