The Show

This week I talked to Nathen Harvey from Opscode about the Chef configuration management software.

Links

• Opscode Home Page
• Overview of Chef - Great diagram showing the various components
• ChefConf - April 24-26, 2013
• Food Fight Show - Great podcast about DevOps and Chef
• DEVOPS + Chef + Windows at Ancestry.com
• Chef Documentation
• Chef on IRC
• Learning Chef Part 1 - 4 part series (so far), it’s on Nathen’s blog which is also highly recommended.
• Community cookbooks - Sorted by function, nice!
• @NathenHarvey

Closing Thoughts

I really liked the diversion into DevOps and hearing Nathan’s take on it, especially as it applies to people in traditional IT shops. Ops doesn’t have to write code to work more closely with developers, and the developers can stay out of servers if that’s what’s desired. It’s all about the collaboration and tearing down of walls.

On the Chef front I think we covered the architecture of the system quite well and also the way that someone can get started and work with it. We didn’t discuss his videos, but they’re linked above and are very helpful in getting your feet wet.

Just like the discussion in Episode #4 it was pointed out that any configuration management is a huge win. Chef is a great tool with a vibrant community.