The guest blog post below is written by Relevance Labs, one of our ChefConf Online Sponsors.
Today, with Chef making their entire product stack open source, they will now have their own distribution that will be sold under a subscription arrangement. If you are a Chef user, upgrade to the latest version (16.2.73) and gain access to features that will further accelerate development and upgrade efforts:
- YAML Support This is one of the marquee features of Chef-Infra 16. Starting with this release, Chef’s core resources can be authored in YAML. In removing the need to learn Ruby to begin working with Chef, we are able to offer a user-friendly framework to express basic elements of the desired infrastructure state
- Unified Mode Chef Infra Client 16 eliminates the complexity of how Ruby is compiled and executed during client runs. Historically, users have had to quickly familiarize themselves with the internals of Ruby in order to troubleshoot errors and failures in chef recipes and custom resources. Unified mode eliminates the majority of the complexity of Ruby behind the scenes of Chef and provides a significantly improved experience for authoring resources in Chef
- Enhanced Support for Air Gap Environments To better serve customers in highly regulated industries (such as those using Government Cloud and Intelligence Cloud environments) Chef has included several previously external gems and cookbook resources into Chef Infra Client 16, streamlining the process of getting started without requiring users to track down commonly used gems to include as a part of their infrastructure management toolkit
Cookstyle is a code linting tool (a tool that analyzes source code to flag programming errors, bugs, stylistic errors, and suspicious constructs), it replaces a tool called Foodcritic. And now helps to write better Chef Infra cookbooks by detecting and automatically correcting style, syntax, and logic mistakes in the code
The usage of these tools/features have been blended into our ‘Chef Factory’ best practices.
The Relevance Lab Chef Factory Advantage
Chef Factory is Relevance Lab’s proprietary Chef implementation model, it is a collection of best practices, reference architectures and a library of cookbooks, recipes, profiles and plans delivered by a certified workforce spread across North America and APAC.
Some of the success stories of the Chef Factory model:
- Conversion of over 300 Puppet modules to Chef cookbooks in less than 3 months at low price point
- Development of 300+ cookbooks for an ISV to support multiple technology stacks for their products in a short time – this resulted in faster company wide adoption of Chef leading to efficiencies in product development, testing and tech support
- Development of sizeable library of profiles to support FEDRAMP for a leading cloud services provider
The Chef Factory practices also apply to:
Converting your home-grown scripts into Chef cookbooks and InSpec profiles:
- Artefacts are tested and certified to be functionally equivalent to existing configurations, scripts, or automation code
- All artefacts are estimated as Simple, Medium or Complex after reviewing existing configurations
Managing your ongoing Chef Sustaining Tasks:
- Ongoing Cookbook Maintenance activities due to latest releases of Ruby Gems, Dependent Community Cookbooks and Chef releases
- Chef Client and Chef Server upgrades and Production Roll outs
- Cookbook Testing and End -to End Application testing upon Chef Client and Chef Server upgrades to validate software dependencies
- Routine Chef Infrastructure health checks and migration of Chef Infrastructure. (Supporting both Datacenter and Cloud Installations)
Contact us for a free workshop and a discounted POC!
