Chef Across The Enterprise

Chef isn't just for standing up machines anymore. With so much riding on enterprise infrastructure, it's tough to move things around with confidence, and to remain certain that everything you removed, moved or replaced is properly back online after such a shift. Chef has evolved to provide this sort of reassurance to IT administrators and developers, far beyond the original use case of provisioning and standing up single machines. Brittany Woods, automation engineer at CARFAX, said that "I'm responsible for making sure Chef works for us, and making sure people's lives are easier because of it. We are a Linux shop. Primarily, we use Chef. Exclusively we use Chef for Linux. We build the systems to support the products, and we Chef to make that happen, and we use Chef to manage those systems throughout their entire lifecycle," said Woods. "Chef is our way to fully manage that architecture from configuration--configuration specific to apps, configuration speicfic to tooling that we use--basically the entire build of the system outside of provisioning... Right now we are comprised of several different smaller teams that maintain a different focus. What products they support, they maintain cookbooks for those products. My role is to make them successful. To ensure they have the tools they need to be successful, and also to manage the Chef architecture," said Woods. Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEWRCSeYzQ0