Tag Archives: chef

Link: “Let’s think about control. I’d struggle to find any engineers operating within a DevOps mindset eschew control of their production systems. I encourage the use of a CMDB, but again, it’s live, automatically updated, and software-based. It’s cal

“Let’s think about control. I’d struggle to find any engineers operating within a DevOps mindset eschew control of their production systems. I encourage the use of a CMDB, but again, it’s live, automatically updated, and software-based. It’s called a Chef server. Similarly, ITIL places a strong emphasis on configuration. Teams I have built do the same. All changes to the system are made in code, go through a peer review process, are automatically tested, and rolled out in a recordable, repeatable, and auditable manner. I encourage tracking of all changes that are made to the system. To do that, I use git and I track problems and resolution in a ticketing system. That could be Jira or Zendesk. When it comes to risk management, compliance, and security, again, I turn to the Chef ecosystem. Chef Compliance, as part of the Chef automation system, provides ways to specify compliance requirements as testable specification, which can then be used for audit and management.”

All that configuration management, logging, and automation gives what’s needed for ITIL-level tracking.
Original source: “Let’s think about control. I’d struggle to find any engineers operating within a DevOps mindset eschew control of their production systems. I encourage the use of a CMDB, but again, it’s live, automatically updated, and software-based. It’s cal

Chef Automate: the big stack o’ stuff from Chef

Chef stack diagram

The idea behind this consolidation is to give organizations system-wide insight across all their applications and their supporting environments, be they in the cloud or within private data centers.

Also, some momentum updates:

More than 80 percent of Chef’s revenue now comes from enterprise deployments, consisting of more than 900 commercial customers.

See also Tim Anderson’s coverage at The Register.

Source: Chef Rolls all of its IT Management Ingredients into One Package, Chef Automate

Sputnik Cloud Launcher – Doing More DevOps

One of the tools in Project Sputnik is the “cloud launcher.” The idea for this tool is to help instrument a DevOps life-cycle: the tool models out a simulated cloud on your desktop during development, and then deploys it to “real” clouds once you’re ready. We demonstrated one version of the cloud launcher at Dell World this week that uses juju.

In the meantime, OpsCode’s Matt Ray has been working on another approach (which he describes in the above video) that uses Chef under the covers. See the code checked into the Sputnik repo as well. I’m looking at these two versions as proofs of concept, or even “spikes” to explore how to best implement the idea. We’re eager to get feedback and engagement from the community to figure out which approach (or a third!) is most helpful.