Is Chef the configuration management and automation tool for your operations team? Here’s what a DevOps member shared with me about a POC he was involved in, including Chef, Puppet, and CFEngine.
Is Chef the configuration management and automation tool for your operations team? Here’s what a DevOps member shared with me about a POC he was involved in, including Chef, Puppet, and CFEngine.While I was interviewing candidates for an automation engineer job this guy starts mentioning he had been on a DevOps team with a large online university that is well known in the Phoenix area. I was blown away to find out he had been involved in multiple proofs of concepts (POCs) using Chef, Puppet, DynamicOps, and CFEngine with VMware vSphere as the infrastructure.
He didn’t share too many details from the POC, but what he did share was that when all the POCs were completed Opscode Chef was the best and easiest solution to deploy and had the best features for what they were trying to do on their DevOps team, server configuration automation.
The One that Got Away!
I was really excited to find someone in the Phoenix area with his experience and made an offer to him I thought he wouldn’t refuse, but unfortunately, after considering it he ended up turning me down because of the commute from the west side of Phoenix to Chandler was too far of a daily commute. I even threw in 2 days of work from home to sweeten the offer but he still wasn’t interested…bummer! 🙁
Use a Free Trial of Hosted Opscode for Your POC
Another thing he mentioned was that Opscode has a free trial of their hosted product that allows you to use Chef on 5 servers. This was what their DevOps team skills used for their POC and he said it was enough to test all the proof of concept test plan objectives.
I admit this is not much of a review of Chef but for what it’s worth, I know this guy has the goods and where he works, and they are serious about software development and DevOps automation tools.
Furthermore…
I’d say if you are looking at Chef, Puppet, or other tools for automation, it won’t hurt to start with a free account of hosted Chef and if it does what you want or meets your expectations or test plans – look no further…
One final note from my interview with this guy was he also had positive things to say about DynamicOps which was recently purchased by VMware.
Here’s a link to get your free hosted Opscode account to run your own POC with Chef on 5 Servers.
Do you have a POC you would like to share with us, please share your comments?
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