What to Talk About at ChefConf 2020 – Chef Infra

Hello ChefFriends! Are you thinking about submitting to the ChefConf 2020 Call for Presentations? We hope you are! If you’re searching for some topic suggestions, here’s a few for folks working with Chef Infra!

For all of our past ChefConf talks, check out our YouTube Channel for recordings. Let’s look at some topics from ChefConf 2019 around Chef Infra.

Running Chef Infra in Windows environments is always an interesting topic. Plenty of organizations are expanding their automation goals into their Windows environments. Justin Rivait of CUNA Mutual Group covered “Lessons Learned while Developing Cookbooks for a Windows-Centric Organization”. Do you have any tips and tricks for Chef Infra in Windows environments? What methods are you using to test and deploy your cookbooks for Windows platforms? 

Maybe you have experience running Chef Infra in huge environments. Maybe they’re regulated for the financial services sector or some other requirements. Chef’s Matt Ray and Egor Cole of Fastlane Solutions talked about “Banking on Automation: Modernizing Chef Across the Enterprise”. Are you working in a regulated environment? Or in an environment that is subject to new regulations that you used Chef Infra to help you adhere to? 

Attendees at ChefConf 2020 will be from a wide range of industries and have different levels of knowledge about Chef Infra. Maybe you’re deep in the weeds on something like OHAI. Dan-Joe Lopez and Juan Martinez Sr. from SAP gave us some insight into working with “Custom OHAI Plugins at Enterprise Scale”. While it seems really niche, another attendee told me he was going to use their project almost immediately after ChefConf. You just never know where the kindred spirits are. 

Maybe you’ve been using Chef Infra for a long time. Some of our users have been working on Chef for years and share their stories about maintaining and improving their Chef installations to help their organizations. Capital One has shared their evolution story with us. They started in 2018 with “Capital One’s Fully Automated, Scalable & Regionally Fault-tolerant Chef Platform” and returned in 2019 to give us an update, “Evolution of Capital One’s Enterprise Chef Platform”. Maybe you’ve seen them at a Chef Meetup, too. What have you learned about using Chef Infra over the years that might be interesting to others? Maybe there have been some surprises about automating your platforms, or some intriguing lessons learned.

There’s plenty to talk about for users of Chef Infra. How are you helping your organization reach its goals? Using Chef InSpec or Chef Habitat?  Check back for future posts on other aspects of the Chef ecosystem that will be featured at ChefConf 2020. We look forward to your CFP submissions!

Mandi Walls

Mandi is Technical Community Manager for Chef. She can be found online @LNXCHK.