[chef] Re: Re: suggestions for upcoming community summit

[Bryan Berry < >]

>Sure, there's "use the service" but that's not always the best
>business decision.  What other ways can we help support the devs?

+1 on that. My organization doesn't intend to purchase hosted chef but there should be some way for such organizations to help "invest" in the future development of Chef. 

On Tue, Nov 1, 2011 at 5:41 PM, Peter Norton < "> > wrote:

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
>