[chef] Any experiences building on top of Chef?

[Jeppe Nejsum Madsen < >]

Ohai,

I would be interested in hearing how people are building tools on top of Chef. Basically I'm thinking an orchestration layer with simple tasks such as "spin up a new qa environment with latest build", "shutdown all dev environments" etc.

We have all the low level components done with Chef. And while everything works using e.g. knife commands, it would be nice to shield e.g. QA from having to install chef, clone repo, remember long command lines etc.

So, are there any good tools for these scenarios? If you've built your own, how did you approach it it? Using knife, the Chef gem or the Chef REST Api?

/Jeppe