Chef Workflow Strategies

TOPIC

You've implemented Chef. You've read http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Working+with+Git+and+Cookbooks . But your devops team steps on each other's toes when trying to make changes to git/chef. How do you handle multiple people working on your git/chef implementation?

At this Meetup, three different organizations will present their team's workflow strategy. Come see how others are doing it, and then discuss your own experiences/workflow.

PRESENTERS

Daniel Schauenberg is a Software Engineer for Etsy's infrastructure and devtools team. Etsy has been using Chef since 2010 and have about 30 people who regularly make changes. Those changes go out to ~1000 nodes we manage with chef. Our whole workflow is based on knife-spork, written by Jon Cowie of Etsy's Web Operations team.

Julian Dunn is a Senior Systems Operations Engineer at SecondMarket, managing cloud-based infrastructure using Chef. SecondMarket has been using Chef since 2011, when we migrated from Puppet. We're using a number of tools to manage cookbook development, testing and deployment workflows. Among them are Berkshelf, test-kitchen, and Spork.

Aaron Quint is the CTO at Paperless Post. Paperless Post implemented Chef in 2011. Over the past year, we've tried various strategies to allow a team of six Ops engineers (with the goal of eventually including 20+ developers) to manage ~350 nodes. We are currently using a workflow that deeply integrates with Github as well as other tools developed in-house.