Chef can be difficult to learn at first and may cause frustration as there is a learning curve. It is important to start small with basic cookbooks, follow tutorials, and ask questions. Over time, as experience with Chef grows, so does understanding of its capabilities. Chef is constantly evolving through an active community, and what seems challenging now will become clearer. While the learning process may involve stages of denial, anger and feeling overwhelmed, acceptance that difficulties are normal helps to appreciate Chef's power for automating infrastructure.

1. The 5 Stages of Chef Grief
My First 6 months with Chef, and Getting Around the Pitfalls

2. About me
• Graduated from Trinity
University
• Did technical recruiting before
DevOps
• Craft Beer Lover
• Futurama Quoter

3. Problem Statement
• Learn chef

4. Problem Statement
• Learn Chef
• Put all our infrastructure as code

5. Problem Statement
• Learn Chef
• Put all of Our infrastructure as code
• Create a configurable, reusable Hadoop cookbook

6. Problem Statement
• Learn Chef
• transition all of our infrastructure as code
• Create a configurable, reusable Hadoop Cookbook
• Can you do it in two weeks?

7. Denial:
A.K.A. ignorant bliss

8. Denial: About Chef
Chef Denial
• It will be a no-brainer installation
• I will master it in a week
• documentation is easy to look up
• it is always faster than manual or scripts
• I will only have to learn Ruby

9. Anger:
A.K.A. Ragequit

10. Easy Installation?
• How do I google it?
• Multiple tutorials
• All very specific to what they are doing

11. Gem Errors
• Gem Version conflicts
• Incomplete installation
• Have to have Rubygems installed

12. Solution: Omnibus
• Versions for every distribution
• Easy to follow
• Installs everything you need to set up Chef

13. Outlining Chef
• You want to data bag me where?
• Role vs. cookbook, vs. environment vs. Chef-Repo
• Why so many attributes?
• Chef-solo vs. client vs. Enterprise
vs. server
• .pem issues

14. Logically
• I am not a smart man
• It’s all my fault
• I am not cut out for DevOps

15. Chef is hard
• different way of doing things
• involves learning a lot about a certain product
• requires unlearning and changing of patterns
• You will stumble, and you will fall

16. use learn chef
• Listen to Nathan Harvey
(he’s a pretty cool guy)
• https://learnchef.opscode.com/
• FOLLOW THE TUTORIALS
BEFORE TRYING
ANYTHING!!!

17. Bonus: Chef office hours
• Every thursday (12:00-2:00 Pacific)
• Designed to answer beginner questions
• Primarily one on one

18. Bargaining
and a little depression

19. Rule: What is the minimum I
can do?
• Minimum cookbooks that I have
to write
• Minimum programming I have
to learn
• Minimum manual scripting I
have to do

20. Community cookbooks:
expectation
• community.opscode.com
• over 100 cookbooks for basics (java, nagios, Hadoop)
• Written so they can be all-inclusive
• Should be a no-brainer

21. Community Cookbooks:
reality
• try to be all inclusive, end up as spaghetti code
• often only make sense if you are an advanced user
• highly opinionated
• are often out of date, buggy, or even deprecated

22. Write my own cookbooks:
expectation
• It’s my code, it should be easy to follow
• still won’t have to learn much Ruby
• should be easy to pick up all the pieces of Chef now

23. Write my own Cookbooks:
the reality
• the 10x issue of all-inclusive
• Still having to learn ruby/ a lot of chef
• I was still doing manual steps

24. The solution
• write single-use cookbooks
• do it however it works
• Don’t stress

25. Avoid what you don’t need
until you are ready
• no data bags
• no wrappers
• No LWRP’s
• no plugins

26. I am DevOpsing so hard right
now
• Replaced scripts with actual
code!
• Some attributes
• minimal roles
• Getting more Ruby every day

27. Overwhelmed Understanding

28. Plugins
• Developed by the community
• There are a lot of them. A lot
• Not easy to decide.
• Don’t solve all of your problems

29. Solution
• There kind of isn’t one
• adopt as needed
• listen to the community
• Don’t write your own

30. Testing
• okay, how do I test
• 15 different testing suites
• 4 different ways to run tests
• Adds a lot of time to my workflow

31. Solution: Chef DK
• Contains all the pieces of the chef
• includes testing harness (test-kitchen) and plugins
• installs pieces for unit, integration testing
• it is officially chef-sponsored

32. Continuously Evolving
• dramatically transformed in just 6 months
• energetic, enthusiastic community
• Huge things are coming in the future
• chef 12
• chef supermarket
• evolution of chefdk

33. Acceptance/Awesome!get raise
make money
buy khakis

34. in just 3 points
• Chef is hard, and that’s okay
• Don’t make it too hard and go to learn chef, take time
• This is an evolving product

35. -DevOps Borat
“To make error is Human, to propagate error to
all server in automatic way is DevOps”