Managing Cookbooks, Roles, Databags across version releases. Chef-Boston Meetup Aug 28th 2012

1. Team Development
Workflows
Managing Cookbooks, Roles & Databags Across Versions
Chef Boston Meetup
Aug 28th 2012
Pete Cheslock
Sonian

2. Caveats & Thoughts
 I’m not advocating the Right™ way to do any one thing
here.
 This works for us (Sonian) – it may not work for you.
YMMV
 A good process evolves over time. What we started is
not where we are today and not where we’ll be in 6
months.
 Ownership – set it and forget it won’t work here.

3. Our Problem
 Many different software stacks with separate customer
SLA’s
 Small changes could have large consequences.
 Many people making changes to branches (inside and
outside our team).
 High velocity – many hot-fixes – limited testing – Zero
Tracking.
 Technical Debt (An easy one to blame stuff on)

4. Stage 1
 Ticket Bankruptcy – Make the move to Jira
 Invest in cleanup of technical debt
 Specifically in our Git Repository
 Split the team into Proactive/Reactive Team
 Decrease distractions
 Increase focus – decrease context switching
 Introduction of myself as the “buffer”
 New Feature Requests
 Hotfixes or Sysadmin type tasks
 Support our Engineering and Support Team

5. Stage 2
 Deployment Checklists
 Peer reviewed – across departments
 “Follow the checklist”
 Deploy Ownership – Team Based Deploys
 Make our chef runs faster/more efficient.
 Cookbook refactor, invest in knife plugins, LWRP,
overall quality.
 Monitoring, Metrics, Security

6. Stage 3
 Build apps to support our technology
 External
 Sensu (https://github.com/sensu) (MIT)
 SCLI (https://github.com/sonian/scli) IBM Smartcloud
command line tool (MIT)
 Mise En Place (Soon to be released with MIT license)
 Fog (https://github.com/fog) - Contributions to Smartcloud
and VPC support.
 Internal
 Security
 Automation

8. Taking Code from Idea to
Deployment
 Sprint Planning (3 week Dev – 1 week QA)
 Create Jira Story – Prioritize in next sprint unless
needed now.
 All Chef branches need Jira stories
 Commit, Merge, Push, Test
 All Jira stories (and branches) live in QA for regression
testing
 After QA Approval – merge to master

9. Development Simplicity
Dev QA
Master
(Daily) (Daily)
Cut Branch
Merge Make Changes
(eng-9999)

10. Production Complexity
Cherry-Picks Forward
release/2012- release/2012-
master
07-01 08-01
base/2012- base/2012- Rebase & Squash Commit
Branches Backwards
07-01 08-01
Cut Branch
eng-9999

11. Why?
 Can’t have untested changes make it out to production.
Small changes could have unintended consequences.
 Sets of chef cookbooks and application code (often tied
together) were tested at the same time.
 Important to get the processes in place prior to
investment in automation.
 Technical Debt (The scapegoat)

14. Questions?
 Contact me:
 Email: pete.cheslock@sonian.net
 Twitter: @petecheslock