Show Date: Thursday, 23 August 2012

Chad Gibbons recently wrote up a blog post titled Lessons Learned on using Chef from Development to Production. The post describes Chad’s experiences in using Chef at AlertLogic. tl;dr - “If you aren’t managing your infrastructure using Chef… you are simply wasting your time.”

Over on the puppet labs site, there’s a post about Why Puppet has its own configuration language. “… the trade-off in a DSL is that you can do more work in less code, and it’s generally far simpler and more approachable to the average user, but it’s also less powerful, which means there are some problems they can’t be used to solve…”

In episode 23 we talked about OmniOS. Since then, OmniTI’s Robert Treat posted on their blog about Why OmniOS. “…limping along with a rotting corpse of Open Solaris wasn’t an option, we needed something that was actively developed and that we could count on for the foreseeable future…”

Matt Ray recently presented at the Australian OpenStack User Group. His slides on Chef for OpenStack are available on Slideshare.

Whisk is a simple cookbook manager for Chef, inspired by librarian and berkshelf. Unlike these tools, Whisk only concerns itself with fetching and preparing exactly what you tell it, and will not resolve dependencies for you or make any decisions about which code gets downloaded for you.

Mat Schaffer presented on Test Driven Deployment at last night’s Philly Devops meetup. He discussed Vagrant, test-kitchen, berkshelf, chefspec, foodcritic, strainer, gurard, and minitest chef handler, you know, all the usual testing subjects. Slides are available on speakerdeck.

Over on the 37 Signals blog there’s a new post about how they’ve tuned their nagios to improve performance. Nagios with Chef can lead to lots of checks which can lead to lots of load on your monitoring server. Read the post for some insight into how 37 Signals improved performance on their monitoring servers.