Chef at CfgMgmtCamp 2018

2018 marked the fifth anniversary of the CfgMgmtCamp conference, and for this milestone, the organizers decided to invite the luminaries of configuration management back to Gent, Belgium for a reunion. Attendees heard from Mark Burgess (inventor of promise theory and CFEngine), Luke Kanies (founder of Puppet) as well Chef’s own CTO and co-founder, Adam Jacob, in addition to many other talks across the conference’s ten tracks.

Adam Jacob’s keynote focused on the future of configuration management. What is the future, though, but the things that we ourselves have not yet invented and will? Adam cites Alan Kay, ex-of Xerox PARC, and his famous quote that “the best way to predict the future is to invent it.” The call to action for those of us working in this field is to do that. Adam left attendees with a few ideas about where to start and what to disrupt next. You can watch his reflective and inspiring keynote below.

As in years past, Chef convened a track about Chef, InSpec and Habitat as well as hosting a hack day. Some of the highlights from the room included:

• Heike Hallenberger from DB Systel (the IT arm of Deutsche Bahn, Germany’s railway system) gave a talk about managing IT infrastructure on high-speed trains using Chef
• Tim Smith speaking about what’s coming up in Chef 14, material that will be covered in an upcoming webinar
• Salim Afiune, one of the engineers on Chef Automate, with a talk about how Chef’s own engineering team is using Habitat to ensure a consistent environment and deployment all the way from the laptop to production.

Finally, Chef’s VP of Community Development, Nathen Harvey, gave a talk in the Ansible room about how to use InSpec to test Ansible playbooks.

We very much enjoyed attending CfgMgmtCamp for another year and meeting you all. Though tired, the team capped off the week by flying to Germany for our inaugural Chef Community Summit in Berlin, which we will recap in another blog post.