[chef] Re: suggestions for upcoming community summit

[Peter Norton < >]

Some great ideas.  As a new user just developing my use of the
platform, I'd like to throw out some things from what may be a
different perspective:

1) Clustering of the server.  How to make it resilient in the face of
cloud providers SLA levels.
2) Managing clusters.  I'm taken with the cluster_chef recipes that
infochimps is developing.  Defining infrastructure as clusters that
are independent but which can communicate seems a natural extension of
infrastructure as code.
3) Making configuration more transparent.  It'd be nice to have a tool
that could spit out graphviz or something similar to display
dependencies and actions on a system.
4) Auditing/intentions of configuration changes are opaque.  There is
a rich set of data that chef sits in the middle of, but it doesn't
seem like it does a lot of reporting on this data.  Izf I want to know
who uploaded a recipe and when it was applied to a node, I'd like to
have that come from "knife audit cookbook" and "knife audit node" and
see a history of what changes have been made.
5) Sizing and scaling a chef server/infrastructure.  Redundancy, CYA, etc.
6) How to best support opscode, chef, the community.  What options are
there to support opscode and chef to ensure a thriving community?
Sure, there's "use the service" but that's not always the best
business decision.  What other ways can we help support the devs?

-Peter

On Tue, Nov 1, 2011 at 7:14 AM, Bryan Berry 
<
 >
 wrote:
> Unfortunately, I will not be able to attend the community summit. I imagine
> there are some others in the same boat as myself.
> It would be great if the event could be livestreamed for this reason.
> I have written up just a few suggestions for the event, such as live
> streaming and topics to address.
>
> It would be great if others could add their ideas well
> http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Suggestions+for+Community+Summit
> I have just a few items. Here is what is there so far
>
> How can we make the cookbook site and cookbook community as useful and
> vibrant as that of rubygems?
> What are anti-patterns for cookbooks?
> What are best practices for cookbooks?
> Performance Tuning
> Building on top of chef, a la crowbar
> Cookbook testing and how to automate it, esp. for opscode/cookbooks
> What should the role of opscode/cookbooks be?
> Professional certification for Chef, like the MCSE, RHCE. Should Chef have
> it? How can we make it not suck
>