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ChefConf Talk Spotlight: A sobering journey from Parse / Facebook

Lucas Welch | Posted on | awesome chefs | ChefConf | community

We’re five weeks away from ChefConf 2015 and we’re filling seats fast, so, if you haven’t already, register today and guarantee your seat at the epicenter of DevOps.

Continuing our series of spotlights on the tremendous talks, workshops, and sponsors at this year’s show, today we focus on Awesome Chef Charity Majors – a production engineer at Parse (now part of Facebook) – and her session, “There and back again: how we drank the Chef koolaid, sobered up, and learned to cook responsibly” – a must-see based on the title alone!

Here’s the download on Charity’s talk:

When we first began using Chef at Parse, we fell in love with it. Chef became our source of truth for everything. Bootstrapping, config files, package management, deploying software, service registration & discovery, db provisioning and backups and restores, cluster management, _everything_. But at some point we reached Peak Chef and realized our usage model was starting to cause more problems than it was solving for us. We still love the pants off off Chef, but it is not the right tool for every job in every environment. I’ll talk about the evolution of Parse’s Chef infrastructure, what we’ve opted to move out of Chef, and some of the tradeoffs involved in using Chef vs other tools.

This will be a great session for all of you looking for guidance on tooling, or even a friendly debate about the subject. It will also provide patterns of success from some seriously smart and active Chefs over at Parse/Facebook.

As for the presenter herself, Charity is happily building out the next generation of mobile platform technology. She likes free software, free speech and single malt scotch.

See you at ChefConf!