Last week we held our fourth annual Chef Community Summit in London on Tuesday and Wednesday. As our primary annual event in the EMEA region, folks from the UK, Netherlands, France, Belgium, Germany, and Austria, in addition to the US and Japan attend the London Summit.
Our London event is different from the Community Summits in the United States, which Nathen Harvey (@nathenharvey) wrote about last week. We run London more like a DevOpsDays – it’s a two-day event, with scheduled talks in the morning and Open Spaces each afternoon. This gives us a chance to showcase some of the projects our EMEA community is working on for folks who might not be able to attend ChefConf in the US every year. We feature speakers from the community and from the Chef Engineering and customer facing teams as well as Nathen and Adam Jacob (@adamhjk).
Our community speakers this year shared some great stories with us about their journeys with Chef, Habitat, and InSpec. On Tuesday, Aaron Kalin (@martinisoft) of DNSimple shared his story of being part of our community. Aaron is a longtime member of the Chef community. David McGrath of Union Street is newer to Chef, and spoke enthusiastically about using Chef with his team over the past year. Blake Irvin from SmartB shared his experiences being one of the folks on the bleeding edge of rolling out Habitat. On Wednesday, Ian Grant talked about using InSpec at Barclays Bank.
Heike Hallenberger shared a super cool story about using Chef to manage trains at DB Systel, giving us great insight into running chef in unusual environments.
We also welcomed back Steven Murawski (@StevenMurawski), who is now working on awesome community stuff at Microsoft.
Our open spaces also included lots of diverse topics, with Policyfiles being a big one, as well as workflow tooling and methodology. Also of interest was what’s next for Test Kitchen. In case anyone wasn’t familiar with Habitat, Graham Weldon (@predominant) from Rakuten rolled up in the main room and walked folks through getting started during the last open space session. Awesome!
We love having the community visit us in London and hope we don’t have to wait until next year to see everyone again. Check out our EMEA events and stop by to say hello if we’re in your city!