Food Fight

The Podcast where DevOps chefs do battle

Test Kitchen

Show Date: Thursday, 23 August 2012

Panel

In the News

  • Chad Gibbons recently wrote up a blog post titled Lessons Learned on using Chef from Development to Production. The post describes Chad’s experiences in using Chef at AlertLogic. tl;dr - “If you aren’t managing your infrastructure using Chef… you are simply wasting your time.”

  • Over on the puppet labs site, there’s a post about Why Puppet has its own configuration language. “… the trade-off in a DSL is that you can do more work in less code, and it’s generally far simpler and more approachable to the average user, but it’s also less powerful, which means there are some problems they can’t be used to solve…”

  • In episode 23 we talked about OmniOS. Since then, OmniTI’s Robert Treat posted on their blog about Why OmniOS. “…limping along with a rotting corpse of Open Solaris wasn’t an option, we needed something that was actively developed and that we could count on for the foreseeable future…”

  • Matt Ray recently presented at the Australian OpenStack User Group. His slides on Chef for OpenStack are available on Slideshare.

  • Whisk is a simple cookbook manager for Chef, inspired by librarian and berkshelf. Unlike these tools, Whisk only concerns itself with fetching and preparing exactly what you tell it, and will not resolve dependencies for you or make any decisions about which code gets downloaded for you.

  • Mat Schaffer presented on Test Driven Deployment at last night’s Philly Devops meetup. He discussed Vagrant, test-kitchen, berkshelf, chefspec, foodcritic, strainer, gurard, and minitest chef handler, you know, all the usual testing subjects. Slides are available on speakerdeck.

  • Over on the 37 Signals blog there’s a new post about how they’ve tuned their nagios to improve performance. Nagios with Chef can lead to lots of checks which can lead to lots of load on your monitoring server. Read the post for some insight into how 37 Signals improved performance on their monitoring servers.

  • The first release candidate of Chef 10.14.0 is out. This release adds the why-run feature as well as output formatters. Check the mailing list for the announcement.

Upcoming Meetup Groups and Events

Special Offers

  • Do you know someone who needs help getting started with Chef? Be sure to use listen to the episode for a discount code for upcoming Opscode Workshops.

Cookbook News

New Cookbooks

John Dewey is back with even more cookbooks to install common utilities.

Escape Studios Development has released

  • yasm v0.0.1 - devesc This cookbook provides an easy way to install the Yasm Assembler.

Updated Cookbooks

Outline

  • Introduction to Test Kitchen
  • Anatomy of a Test Kitchen run
  • Examples in apache2 and mysql cookbooks
  • Configuring Test Kitchen
  • Future of Test Kitchen
  • Contributing to Test Kitchen

Picks

Bryan

  • windsurfing
  • Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

Nathen

Andrew

Joshua

Download

Test Kitchen with Joshua Timberman & Andrew Crump: Download here

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

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