Food Fight

The Podcast where DevOps chefs do battle

ChatOps at Github With Jesse Newland

Show Date: 22 August 2012, 13:00 PST

Panel

In the News

  • Jamie Winsor has started a guide on how to author a cookbook the berkshelf way. It is still a work in progress but it is a great primer on the Riot Games’ way of cookbook development. Of special note is the berks cookbook command which can be used in place of knife cookbook create. It will generate a Vagrantfile, .gitignore, Gemfile, and even a Thorfile with a foodcritic task.

  • Jamie Winsor has released version 0.0.2 of ridley a reliable Chef API client with a simple intuitive DSL. Also, it is threadsafe and supports multiple connections per thread. Lastly it works with Hosted Chef, Open Source Chef, and private Chef.

  • Archlinux may be switching its default init system from the Old Skool sysv init system to systemd.

  • Yosefk had a great blog post What “Worse is Better vs The Right Thing” is really about. tl;dr an evolved system will beat the best designed system. The article has a great quote from linus

    Don’t underestimate the power of survival of the fittest. And don’t ever make the mistake that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error process with a feedback cycle. That’s giving your intelligence much too much credit.
    We just mentioned Ridley, a Chef API client. A good Chef API already exists in Dan Ryan’s spice. We also talked about berkshelf which competes with librarian-chef. This competition is not a bad thing, it is an awesome thing. It this competition that drives software quality in the open-source world. This post also made me think about the keynote that Adam Jacob gave at Chefconf where he essentially said that he wanted to give sysadmins better primitives, not prescribe to them how to configure their systems.

  • Dan Ryan has released Rorschach a simple alerting tool that uses Graphite for event data.

  • Obfuscurity has put a great screencast up on how to install graphite even if you use a chef cookbook to set up your graphite installation I highly recommend watching this screencast to get a better sense of how all the pieces work together. Obfuscurity would like to know if there is interest in further screencasts on graphite. If you like this one, let him know! I vote for a screencast on how to use Composer.

  • The open-sourcing of erChef has begun! There are bunch of erChef repos now in https://github.com/opscode, just to name a few chef_objects, chef_db, chef_index, and more on the way!

  • We’ve hinted at this project before but now it’s finally out. Test-kitchen is a framework for running project integration tests in an isolated environment using Vagrant and Chef.

  • Test-kitchen relies on baseboxes created by the bento project, which is a set of modularized veewee definitions. As a direct result of bento, Opscode has made a set of vagrant boxes publicly available, each containing the omnibus version of chef and ruby 1.9. If you work on public cookbooks and you do testing with vagrant, I highly recommend you use these boxes. Your collaborators will thank you.

  • Seth Vargo released version 0.1.0 of strainer which enables the loading of cookbook dependencies and better PATH support.

  • After months of planning + over 7000 lines changed: Vagrant core is no longer tied to VirtualBox. mitchellh merged the machine-abstraction branch into vagrant master that abstracts all the virtualbox-specific code into a plugin. This means you can now add support for an additional virtualization platform through a plugin. btw, we will have mitchellh and pdebois on the show in early September to talk about the future of Vagrant!

Upcoming Meetup Groups

  • Chef-BOSTON will be meeting on Tuesday, August 28 to talk about Team Development Workflows with Chef
  • The Bay Area Chef User Group will host another Chef Cafe on Thursday, September 6
  • devopsdays Rome are coming up on October 5 and 6th. If you are in Europe or otherwise interested to meet with some really intelligent people, you should come out. The attendance fee is trivial and Bryan’s wife has agreed that you can all stay in his spare bedroom. all of you ;).

Cookbook News

It’s been a while since our last show and the Chefs have been busy! We’ve got 20 new cookbooks and more then 30 updated cookbooks to cover today!

New Cookbooks

Windows

Timothy Smith has been very busy cranking out some Windows Cookbooks including:

  • ad-auth v1.0.4 - tas50 Configures Active Directory authentication support using Likewise Open 6
  • firefox v1.0.0 - tas50 Installs/Configures Firefox 14.0.1 for Windows
  • powergui v1.0.0 - tas50 Installs/Configures PowerGUI for Windows
  • vc2010 v1.0.0 - tas50 Installs Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package
  • filezilla v1.0.0 - tas50 This cookbook installs FileZilla Client 3.5.3 on Windows
  • ms_messagequeue v0.0.2 - tas50 This cookbook installs the Microsoft Message Queueing service

Lest you think Timothy only works on Windows, he’s also released two cookbooks for use on linux:

  • hp-tools v0.3.0 - tas50 - Timothy Smith This cookbook installs the HP Management tools including the HP System Management Homepage
  • kafka v1.0.8 - tas50 Sets up Kafka

John Dewey has released a bunch of cookbooks for useful utilities (is that redundant?)

Chris Roberts is back this week with three new cookbooks:

We’ve got two cookbooks from John Larsen

And, last but not least, the ssl cookbook from Wes Morgan

  • ssl v1.0.7 - cap10morgan A recipe for setting up system-wide SSL certs on Ubuntu / Debian systems. Sets up SSL certs and keys from an encrypted data bag.

Updated Cookbooks

Opscode has been busy with the database cookbooks check the mailing list for more details and discussion about these cookbooks:

Do you have cookbook news that you’d like to share or feedback on the show? Please drop a line to info@foodfightshow.org.

Outline

  • journey to infrastructure as code
  • shadow puppet & moon shine
  • puppet DSL
  • puppet lint & puppet rspec
  • physical vs virtual
  • github has around ~150 physical servers
  • Several dozen cloud instances
  • all physical servers managed in rackspace so they don’t actually ever deal with the hardware
  • Pacemaker, awesome HA tool that is also a PITA
  • chef dominodes, knife-github chef tools written by Jesse
  • day in the life
    • check issues
    • review pull requests
    • ask hubot about nagios
  • Hubot
  • Jesse spends a lot of time on File system management for all the repos
  • Smoke for routing / rpc
  • bert and ernie, erlang rpc tools
  • coffeescript
  • language vs. pre-processors (like coffescript)
  • ruby for sysadmins – Jesse agrees
  • Jesse’s educational background - comp sci then business
  • speeding up I/O
    • 600GB 15K RPM SATA drives
    • stock debian
    • so, not much in terms of optimization
  • continuous deploy
    • master build passes, gets pushed out
    • sometimes to a small number of servers
    • sometimes will deploy a branch first to verify / validate then merge into master
  • mcollective - it’s there but they don’t really use it
  • Puppet runs every hour and on-demand
  • What’s special about github? They’re pushing everything to chat. ChatOps. Communication is the default since everything is done via Hubot in a campfire room. side benefit: free training

Picks

Bryan

lusis

Nathen

Jesse

CLOSE

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Outro Music by David Lutz, the NoOps song!

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ChatOps at Github with Jesse Newland: Download here

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