Getting Started with Chef

My other tutorials sent e-mails with prerequisites so I was able to prepare for them ahead of time. By chance, at lunch I checked to see a massive list of things I was supposed to have done before the session—but never knew about. I didn’t bother attending as I assumed I had no chance to download everything over the conference wifi by the start of the session.

It would’ve been very helpful if the e-mails with the requirements went out ahead of time. It probably would’ve been much better not as an interactive session, but instead as a demonstration.

The fact that most people did not know in advance about the setup required was unfortunate but not insurmountable. However, while I appreciate the presenters’ time and effort, I was disappointed in the session because I don’t feel it adequately addressed some of the advertised points:

• How system integration goes beyond just configuration management.

If covered, this was a hard message to extract from the presentation or apply to chef.

• Chef’s architecture and design including tools and capabilities

We covered a few example knife commands but did not really talk about architecture except as prompted by questions. No chef server architecture was discussed. No alternatives to knife were discussed (not even the server management interface).

• How to download, customize and use existing cookbooks.

A very little was covered here. We did not cover common customization use cases except for brief discussion (account cancellation) prompted by attendee questions.

• How to write data driven cookbooks that use the Chef Server search indexes and data storage.

If we had discussed or covered the example sysadmins recipe at all, this might have addressed this point. I asked a question about integration with external data sources for data bags and got an interesting but orthogonal answer about how I could query something other than data bags to drive a recipe.

• Interacting with the server API through the command-line tool, Knife.

This was adequately addressed but I would have preferred to see this discussion in the form of example workflow.

• How Chef integrates with cloud computing providers and simplifies managing cloud-based systems, public or private

There was no information about this, except that it can be done.

Slides from the tutorial are posted:

www.slideshare.net/jtimberm...

GitHub repository with instructions for installation:

github.com/opscode/oscon201...

(also linked in the slides in context)