Beginners Ask Me Anything - chef-boneyard/chef-summit-2014 GitHub Wiki

Ask Me Anything - Answers to beginning Chef questions

Friday, Ravenna, 10:00am

Convener

Stephen Lauck
Consulting Engineer at Chef
Github

Seth Thomas
Partner Engineer at Chef
Github

Participants

Summary of Discussions

The purpose of the meeting was to provide a safe space for attendees new to Chef to ask any beginning questions about how to get started. The room was split about 50/50 between people looking to ask questions vs. those there to help get those questions answered. The format was designed to be quick and not get bogged down in the details.

Q: Are there any blogs related to Chef?
A: Yes! The Food Fight Show is a bi-weekly podcast that brings together the smartest people in the Chef community and the broader DevOps world to discuss the thorniest issues in system administration.

Q: What is advantage of Chef vs others solutions in the same space?
A: Puppet is product (prescribed way to do something); Chef is framework, many ways, more easily customized. Google search 'puppet vs chef', or 'puppet vs ansible' for further definition

Q: What are all of the tools people are discussing with Chef (Test kitchen, metal, etc)?
A: ...

  • Knife commandline tool to interact with API
  • (ChefDK Development kit for the tools you need to develop Chef codepage has a complete overview of each of the tools)
  • chef-client is the remote agent that communicates with chef server.
  • chef-solo runs locally and needs no server
  • chef-zero is an in memory Chef server that you run locally on your workstation
  • foodcritic is a linting tool
  • rubocop is a ruby linting tool
  • Chef-metal use chef recipes to manage machines in various environments (Intermediate or advance topic)
  • test-kitchen a framework launch a platform in isolation so you can converge an instance with your chef recipe. Check out kitchen.ci for a great tutorial. (Intermediate or advanced topic)

Q: What is Berkshelf and the Berkshelf Way?
A: Berkshelf is a tool for managing cookbook dependencies. Check out Jamie Winsor's talk on the Berkshelf Way for more information around that methodology.

Q: How to go from solo to local. Current using chef with vagrant on windows.
A: Workflow is context dependent. Blog post on site

####ACTION ITEM: tutorial: How do go from using solo to using zero, local mode with vagrant as host

Q: What is difference between chef-solo and chef-zero?
A: Chef solo, runs local; Chef zero runs in memory server (locally), can write recipes as if using a server, without a server

Q: Where to go to see what is available when developing recipes?
A: Keep docs.getchef.com/chef/resources.html open all the time! It has all of the information on recipe DSL there

Q: What is data bag?
A: A data bag Object in server that stores arbitrary json formatted data

Q: Where can I get support?
A: ...

Q: How to use a gem in a recipe?
A: Basically trying to extend chef while chef is running. For simple ruby gem, use chef gem and it installs it at compile phase. More complicated gems and gems with additional dependencies may become challenging

Q: Is there a guide for exactly how to write a cookbook? A: Chef is designed to be applied in many different ways, all specific to individual needs, so no ONE definitive guide to say how to do. Lots of blog and website with guides, (eg., The Berkshelf Way); follow examples of cookbooks written by others (e.g. Sean O’Meara)

Q: I heard something about Ubuntu 14.04 is going to be a problem when working with Chef. Why is that?
A: Ubuntu 14.04 ships with two init systems and Chef does not have a easy way to determine which system is being used

Q: Is there a Chef API client for running Chef on specific systems?
A: ...

  • go client
  • pychef works
  • ridley
  • chef-api
  • spice library

Q: What is FPM? A: effing Package Manager

Q: What medium is best for new users to learn from?
A: Videos and samples, perhaps a weekly roundup of communications similar to what Docker does. Foodcritic describes many of the ‘rules’ that you would want to know/learn as a new author

Q: Is it time to start a HowTo
A: Owners of learningChef may have that on roadmap; specific examples for howTo topics.

Q: Where is the learn chef stuff
A: learnchef.com Provides bite size chunks of content modules; Free VMs to utilize that live for 24hrs

What will we do now? What needs to happen next?