Blogs on Davin Taddeo | DevOps Advocate

Blogs

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Chef Magic

Sun, 01 Nov 2020 12:18:35 -0500

I’ve recently started a new cookbook project called chef_magic. In my experience of working with Chef products at many different customer sites, I’ve found need to dig around outside of the box on more than one occasion to make operating at scale much simpler than can be done when following the “book”.

Ultimately, this repository is a tool for advanced Chef admins working on using chef at the scale of 10’s or 100’s of thousands of nodes. It is not designed to be used by people that are new to Chef, or that don’t understand Ruby, or the ways in which Ruby data structures and Chef interact during a Chef Client run.

So far, we’ve put helpers together that will allow a user to override attributes by reading data from files or from APIs that can then be converted into the node mash object. I’ve also added a few system helpers for working with data bags as a source of override information, as well as some handy tools when working with Windows systems (like finding the %sysroot%). We’ve also managed to put together some custom resources for doing things like managing InSpec waiver files.

If there are any Chefs out there with a desire to help on this project, it’s available publicly to be forked and I’m welcoming all contributions. I really want to thank the following individuals for their help as well in getting this cookbook off the ground:

Again, the majority of tools in this cookbook are not to be used lightly. I won’t be putting this out in the public Supermarket as I don’t want people to blame me for seriously messing up their environments because they didn’t know what they were doing with the code we’ve put together here.

However, if you need to improve upon your effortless design or when using policyfiles, these tools have the potential to help you a lot.

Once Upon A Chef

Tue, 13 Oct 2020 17:26:40 -0400

As many of you know, Chef was recently acquired by Progress. I believe that this has a lot of potential to help Chef deliver its product and feature aspirations faster and more effectively to clients. Progress provides a large resource pool of talent to help get things out of the backlog and delivered to customers. I don’t claim to know the future but there is tremendous potential here for good for the Chef community and Chef customers.

However, in the short term, this is a painful transition. For many reasons people have chosen to leave during this acquisition and it is and will be difficult to see those people go. Chef was not a large company, so any loss feels very significant. Through my own lense, it is difficult to see how this can still be Chef when people that I have worked so closely with have moved on to other projects. Chef has been a career home for me, for the first time in the last 15 years of my career. This past year has been the first time I’ve felt truly happy with my career choices, and I find myself upset and resistent to change. Progress is a company that its employees seem to enjoy and want to be a part of, and they seem to be amazing people, yet they are not Chefs.

I’m not sure if I will continue with Chef. I have a permanent position with Progress that I have accepted, and I have a desire to continue to foster the same great customer success for a product I strongly believe in. Only time can really see though if this is still a place I can think of as home, or if this transition has made this into just another Job.

This is not a critique of Progress in any way. There has been some hubbub in Social Media around this acquisition, and I don’t want to contribute to that. I took some business management courses in college, but I don’t have an MBA, and I don’t pretend to be an expert in how best to acquire a company. This is my own perspective on having a company of less than 300 Chef family turn into a company of ~1500. It’s a big transition.

I have opened up my LinkedIn profile to show that I am #opentowork. I am not looking for just any job, but another potential home in my career. I want to work in the DevOps space, for a smaller company, and ideally for a company that is diverse at all levels. This narrows down my potential employers quite a bit, and I might not find one. I might find that being a Chef@Progress is a truly amazing experience and a huge boost to my career aspirations. Right now, I just want to have all possibilities open.