Chef for Humans

It can be hard to get a team ramped up on Chef; some of the concepts feel counter-intuitive, it can be used in many different ways, and it's not good enough to have one or two team members on-board with Chef. Here's a quick story about how I worked on two teams who adopted Chef.

Transcript

1. Nick Stielau @nstielau
2. Chef for Humans What is a human? • Family 'Hominidae' • Extiction status: "Least Concern" • Sometimes makes mistakes • Sometimes gets 'the fear' • Has < 1,000 devops related repos, tweets, posts, t-shirts, stickers Who work with other humans, possibly at companies
3. A tale of two teams • Publicly Traded • Java shop • SOAP • MySQL • Bare-metal • Pre-funding • Python shop • REST • Cassandra • All-cloud ...both adopting Chef
4. "Download http://bit.ly/7cge5, extract it, and run the ruby executable as root on all of your production servers every 15 minutes."
5. Config Management Leap of Faith
6. Mr Flip "I will personally call your manager and tell him that it's totally loco for you to not work with Chef" http://twitter.com/mrflip
7. Stuff you can do with Chef • 5% Best Practices • 5% Worst Practices • 90% Shoot yourself in the foot / world domination
8. Intelligent Design "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection."
9. Intelligent Systems Design "certain features of the universe and of living things your infrasturcture are best explained managed by an intelligent cause config management tool, not an undirected process such as natural selection ssh-based commands."
10. Promise Theory configure my network start my application lock down sshd put ascii art in MOTD run stuff
11. Repetition Repitition Repitition 1 Converge 2 Converges 3 Converges (ah ah ah) ... ... ... 200 nodes * 2/hr * 24h = 9600 converges/day
12. Okok, I'm on board What about the rest of the (A) team? What about the managers?
13. Example: Etsy • Probably not human http://agile.dzone.com/videos/etsys-chef-repo-2010-2012
14. Know Chef's Tradeoffs • chef-solo vs. chef-server • LRWP abstractions vs. long, clear recipes • daemon vs. crontab • converge on-demand vs. automated • manage system daemon, or just applications • community cookbooks vs. custom • roles, environments, attributes, recipes oh my
15. Apply those tradeoffs to your team Magic https://www.getpantheon.com/news/monitoring-false-dichotomy-and-knob-pain
16. Insensitivity to Initial Conditions Same, same. But different http://blog.serverfault.com/2011/05/25/you-will-be-assimilated/
17. Insensitivity to Initial Conditions To err is human. To have your config management automatically correct your mistake upon convergence is RUGGED http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1937179
18. Chef Makes stuff better • dev workflows • ops sanity • customer experience
19. Dive In! Or wade. But you'll eventually be swimming. It just takes a while to get used to the water. http://www.flickr.com/photos/rosswebsdale/2200187017/
20. Nick Stielau @nstielau