Presented by Stephan Eggermont and Willem van den Ende

Abstract:

Inspired by Patrick Debois’ presentation last year on DevOps we decided that, as developers, we could put on our Ops hats so that we could keep our server configurations DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself).

In the last year we have used both puppet and chef, two relatively new configuration management tools. Together we’ve set up a server and some development virtual machines using Vagrant and Puppet for a startup. Vagrant makes it easy to create virtual machines from chef/ puppet scripts and destroy them at will. 
Willem is also using Chef to create a deployment pipeline at the Dutch national archive.

While doing this, we learnt that each time we logged in to our servers, we were building up technical dept for our configuration management. Hence ‘Server login considered harmful’. We use Vagrant to keep ourselves honest: as long as we can’t recreate a server completely from our scripts, we are not done.

Come to this presentation to learn from our DevOps mistakes and successes, see if you can benefit from the tools we use, and if you also have experience, there is room to exchange ideas.

Format and length:

60 minute presentation.

Intended audience and prerequisites:

Developers, systems administrators and non-technical people who can get over their non-technicality ;). DevOps experience not required.

Objective(s) of the session:

- give participants an overview of configuration management
- see puppet and chef in action
- learn from our mistakes
- give us suggestions for improvement :)

Benefits for participants and presenter(s):

Learn about DevOps and what configuration management can do for you.
See how we deploy puppet and chef, we don’t use complicated central puppet/chef servers, but use git and some of our own scripts instead
We hope to learn some new tricks from the audience (as we did at FOSDEM2011)
See how we’ve progressed over the year, and go faster if you want to try this.