Daniel DeLeo, Opscode Developer, Talk on "Whyrun" mode and latest Chef Client
Details
IMPORTANT NOTES:
This Meetup will be in San Francisco and its Tomorrow (Tuesday) The building has Security requirements that guests sign-in and may have to show ID. The only entrance open after 7pm is to enter from the plaza on Spear Street between Market and Mission. AGENDA:
Food & People Networking Presentation by Daniel DeLeo on Whyrun and Chef 10.14 Q & A More People Networking
Daniel DeLeo, (http://www.linkedin.com/pub/daniel-deleo/8/a54/454) a core developer at Opscode will give a talk on the new "Whyrun" mode of the Chef Client.
This is a powerful new feature that should make it much easier to debug chef-client runs and add features that will allow other tools to introspec chef-client runs.
In short, whyrun tells you why Chef would make changes to your system, without executing the changes. It is comparable to a noop or dryrun mode. However, modifying system state has side-effects.
For instance, installing a package might also start a service. Thus when we examine what each resource would do individually we fail to acknowledge that there are relationships between resources.
Because side-effects are difficult are model, whyrun makes certain assumptions about them to help predict you predict what would happen, and why. Which is exactly what you're asking of it.
( http://www.opscode.com/blog/2012/09/07/chef-10-14-0-released/ )
This should be a very interesting and informative session.