by Simon Clayton
Knowing nothing at all about Chef I decided to spend the workshop day of the conference learning what I was missing out on. This turned out to be a great day of learning led by Anthony Hodson who is a solution architect at Chef.
The day started with an overview of Chef and then progressed into a series of exercises related to building environments and developing both unit and integration tests for the environments to prove that everything had deployed correctly.
Anthony had provided individual VMs for all participants so that there was no messing around with setup and configuration which was absolutely invaluable and meant that we could dive straight in.
There was certainly a lot of learning for someone who was completely new to it all but, the day progressed at a really good rate and we covered a lot of stuff. By the end of the day, we were happily expanding our configuration while using integrated debugging of the deployments and creating more unit tests while adding multiple platforms to our environment.
Overall, it was extremely useful and provided a fantastic introduction and overview of what’s possible with Chef.
About
Simon’s is a self-confessed geek who’s first computer was a ZX81 and he’s been working on PCs since MS-DOS 1.11 and *nix since 1996. He is currently a developer and devops guy in his own business (EventReference : https://eventreference.com) which provides online registration systems for the events industry.
[Note: The views and opinions represented in this review are those of the author and the author alone. FLOSSUK is not responsible for any opinions, comments or values expressed by the author. If you have any concern regarding what has been written you may contact the council at council@flossuk.org.]