Chef is a great tool for managing a vast and complicated server infrastructure, but what if you have fewer servers than fingers? What if you just want a simple little box to host a Rack app? Maybe a staging server to match or a CI server?
With little or no prior knowledge of Chef, you can set up a server fairly quickly if you know the right way to set up your kitchen. (They don’t make it obvious; I’ve lost a few fingers in the process.) We’ll walk through the basics of Vagrant, Chef-solo, Knife-solo, using community cookbooks, and writing your own simple cookbooks.
This talk is great for developers who have almost no Chef experience and could benefit from an intro to the concepts of disposable servers, virtualization, and an infrastructure that is repeatable, testable, and scalable. We ruby developers are used to finding code on GitHub, having a package manager (Rubygems<->Berkshelf), and using DSLs to declare resources (e.g. Rake), so why are so many developers still provisioning servers by hand? This talk aims to change that.
Similar to talk given at Philly.rb in April, 2013.
