Herding Cats: How to Get an Entire Organization Cooking with Chef

on YouTube ↗37m

" summary

Carfax deploys chef server and chef client with an Automate pipeline and Workflow tied into Bitbucket, managing about 3,000–3,500 nodes and roughly 200–250 chef users. Outcomes: an internal cookbook generator called saucepan plus a custom Vagrant/VirtualBox image for faithful local testing, attribute namespacing, strict version pinning in environments, quarterly internal training and user groups, elasticsearch for Automate, and monthly patching/compliance checks — all working to raise adoption and reduce chaos.

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" chapters (28)

1. 0:00Start
2. 0:53Assumptions and Expectations
3. 3:27Confusion on Best Practices
4. 4:12Knowledge Gaps between Users and Teams
5. 5:10Who Are Your Chef Users
6. 7:25The Carfax Chef Essentials Training
7. 7:46How We Use Chef at Carfax
8. 9:45To Standardize Similar Practices Early
9. 11:05Cookbook Generator
10. 11:39Attribute Naming Standards
11. 12:53Version Pinning
12. 13:44Dependency Purgatory
13. 14:35Communication
14. 14:48Chef User Group Meetings
15. 15:15Clear Agenda
16. 16:17Wisdom of Crowds
17. 20:23What Does Chef Look like Now at Carfax
18. 21:43Compliance
19. 22:30Takeaways
20. 23:32How Big Is My Organization and How Many Chef Users Do We Have
21. 24:11How Long Have I Been Using Chef
22. 24:27How Big Is My Chef Infrastructure
23. 28:05How Did We Handle Users That May Not Have Had a Background in Code Have Never Had To Own Code
24. 29:26What Sources Did We Leverage To Figure Out Best Practices
25. 33:25What Was My Experience with Using Workflow and Approver and Shipper and All the Different Roles
26. 33:45Peer Review
27. 35:06What Makes Me Go for Habitat
28. 35:39How Do We Manage Community Cookbooks and Pins and Updates for those Cookbooks

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