Presentation about Chef automation held at Meet Magento Romania 2015, Cluj-Napoca

1. Choose Chef!
Choose high availability,
consistency and speed!

2. Contents
✘ EHLO
✘ Choose High Availability
✘ Choose Consistency
✘ Choose Speed
✘ Choose Chef
✘ High-Level Chef Architecture
✘ Cooking with Chef in Amazon AWS
✘ Resources
✘ Thanks!

3. EHLO
I am Silvian Crețu
sysadmin, devops engineer, technical lead
sometimes developer
some other times DJ, MC
all the time geek
more than 10 years of experience in the IT field

4. 1.
Choose High Availability

5. “I'm a 32 year old IT-man who
works in a basement
Moss, The IT Crowd

6. So... in the past
✘ … sysadmins used to work in basements
✘ … sysadmins used to care about uptime
✘ … sysadmins used to care about servers
✘ … sysadmins used to fix stuff at night
✘ … developers used to be at the mercy of a sysadmin
✘ … and sysadmins are... lazy

7. Availability
✘ usually the first thing a product owner wants to fix
✘ starts with getting the sysadmin out of the basement and have him
work with the developers
✘ buzz-word alert: DevOps!
✘ automation kicks in: BASH scripts, "caveman's Chef"
✘ being highly available doesn't mean caring and nurturing servers
✘ being highly available doesn't mean panicking when disks fail

8. 2.
Choose Consistency

9. “The estimated cost of fixing a bug in
production is 150 times that of fixing the
same bug in development
the agile cost curve

10. Consistency
✘ sysadmin and developer (devops?) meet QA: "works on my
machine"
✘ BASH script doesn't work on QA's machine
✘ in real world there are more servers. QA has a machine
✘ where and how do we load test?
✘ size up the QA environment to match production
✘ size up the load test environment to match the traffic peak

11. 3.
Choose Speed

12. “When do we want it?
all the things meme

13. Speed
✘ well... yesterday... but now should be just fine
✘ buzz-word alert: The Cloud!
✘ let's scale down to keep the costs low, but scale up when needed
✘ and do it fast!
✘ BASH script is not fast enough

14. 4.
Choose Chef

15. “IT automation for speed and awesomeness
chef.io

16. Chef
✘ automation in a platform independent way
✘ idempotent automation => speedy automation
✘ Ruby based DSL => infrastructure as code
✘ sysadmin starts coding
✘ developer and QA start understanding the infrastructure
✘ did I mention devops?
✘ add Vagrant => your entire production environment is on QA's
machine
✘ can run BASH, Python (etc) scripts (beware to keep idempotence)
✘ can run Ruby blocks (beware to keep idempotence)

17. High-Level Chef Architecture

18. 5.
Cooking with Chef in
Amazon AWS

19. Workshop
✘ Amazon OpsWorks
✘ Chef cookbooks from Git and/or S3
✘ Berkshelf
✘ automation: provisioning, server life-cycle, deployments
✘ high availability for both your application and your provisioning
infrastructure
✘ speed: idempotence, faster boot times, etc
Tomorrow morning at 10:00, Cloud Workshops room

20. Resources
✘ http://opensource.com/business/15/9/ato-interview-seth-vargo
✘ http://pixelcog.com/blog/2014/virtualizing-aws-opsworks-with-vagrant/
✘ https://www.chef.io/
✘ https://github.com/scretu/mm15ro
✘ http://docs.aws.amazon.com/opsworks/latest/userguide/best-practices-
packaging-cookbooks-locally.html
✘ http://devopsreactions.tumblr.com/post/118432149429/explaining-puppet-
to-management
✘ http://www.slidescarnival.com/ursula-free-presentation-template/804

21. thanks!
Any questions?
You can find me at
silvian.cretu@gmail.com
https://ro.linkedin.com/in/silviancretu