The Raleigh-area Ruby Brigade June Meeting

__Chef__ by Mark Imbriaco

If you're still using Capistrano or shell scripts to manage your servers, this talk is for you. It's time to automate everything and sleep better at night.

Centralized configuration management is key to any production environment. Standing on the shoulders of tools like Puppet, Chef is a new system configuration framework combining the power of Ruby with tested systems management concepts. Use a tasty Ruby DSL to define your system state. Focus on idempotence to work safely beyond the setup stage. It's a lot of fun; like Rails for sysadmins. Even if you only manage a couple servers, you need to know about it.

During this presentation we'll bootstrap a a 37signals application, Ta-da List, on a collection of virtual machines. We'll go from nothing to a fully configured cluster, discussing along the way the Chef cookbooks that drive the process.

Bio:

Mark Imbriaco is a system administrator at 37signals. Over the past 15 years, he's worked as a system administrator and developer at companies ranging from tiny startups to large corporations like Bank of America and America Online. He lives in Wake Forest with his wife and their four children.