Entering the Chef Ecosystem from the

Windows world

MATT WROCK

MARCH 17, 2015

About Me (matt wrock)Predominately Microsoft dev background

Java developer on windows and solaris/linux before the .net era

10 years in online ad serving platforms

Worked for Microsoft 4 ½ years

Focus on deployment automation and environment setup over past 4 years

Commiter on Chocolatey and Pester

Author of Boxstarter

Software Engineer in Automation and Tools at CenturyLink Cloud

Contributed to WinRM, Vagrant and Test-Kitchen, and more

Blog: HurryUpAndWait.io

Twitter: @mwrockx

Civilization at last!

Lots of tools…. still NOT a SOLVED PROBLEM

So you want to learn Chef?

I have to learn Ruby?

But I’ve never run linux. Am I just starting over?

ArtiWHATory???

Why doesn’t anything work?

I’m gonna send a Pull Request to your HEAD!!

Shiny packaged monoliths

“Devops in a box”

Dragity Dropity

Limited flexibility

Difficult to source control

Open Source – a DIY approach

Specialized

Small

Composable

Programmable!!

Do I have to learn Ruby?

For basic chef usage, you just need to know the recipe DSL

Want to create provisioning drivers, kitchen or vagrant plugins, custom knife plugins or wrap central domain model in a gem? …YES. You need to learn ruby.

Careful not to shoehorn Ruby constructs into familiar .net fundamentals

Example:

Ruby gems is like nuget. Ruby gems is NOT the same as nuget

Its fun to judge…

But not very productive

Language learning tipsFull immersion ◦ No IDEs

◦ Live in the console

Read source code

Contribute to open source even just a few lines at a time

Embrace failure and experiment

Everything takes longer than you think

Making things work

Don’t bother with ruby versions and gem conflicts…

Be kind to yourself

Use the chefdk

Avoid windows updates in chef runs even during initial provisioning

Bake them into base images

Don’t avoid Linux

Sometimes working out of an Ubuntu vagrant box is just easier

Embrace DSC

Package management is a thing

Chocolatey…

Learn it. Love it. Live it.

Is your remoting configured correctly?

Understand the limits of remoting

When to use Scheduled Tasks

Test…Test…TestCheck out the latest Test-Kitchen on windows work

There is a Pester busser

Thank You!!