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ChefConf CFP Track: Cloud, Microservices, and Modern Architectures

Mandi Walls | Posted on | ChefConf | community

ChefConf is the largest community gathering and educational event for teams on the journey to becoming fast, efficient, and innovative software-driven organizations. In other words, you and your team!

ChefConf 2019 will take place May 20-23 in Seattle, Washington, and we want you to present! The ChefConf call for presentations (CFP) is now open.

We’ve been describing our tracks in these blog posts to give you some suggestions and spark ideas for what you could share with the ChefConf community. Chef got a lot of early momentum from early adopters of public cloud services, and it’s been exciting to watch the evolution of the public cloud market.

In the same timeframe, application architectures have gone through a massive change, from monoliths to microservices, flexing the power of APIs and services focused on single tasks.

These evolutions have changed the practice of creating, operating, and maintaining services. Share with us your experiences in this fast-paced ecosystem.

Cloud Automation and Migrations

Building in and migrating to the cloud is fundamentally different than deploying to a data center. Chef and other tools allow you to automate this process. Being in the cloud changes the economics and approaches to things like disaster recovery, scaling up and down, and geolocation of running services. Are you using cloud services? What can you share about:

  • Which clouds are you using?
  • How has moving to the cloud changed your approach?
  • What tools are you using in conjunction with Chef to help manage your cloud instance?
  • What has surprised you about moving workloads to the cloud?

Monolith to Microservice

Deconstructing the monolith that got your business to where it is now, in order to create a constellation of microservices to reach the next goal, is a big task. Has your team participated in a microservice migration project?

  • What motivated your organization to migrate to microservices?
  • Are you using an industry pattern, like Domain-Driven Design, as a guide?
  • How are you modeling your new services for team members?
  • How are you incorporating observability, monitoring, and tracing into your environment?

Containerization

Containers provide many benefits to modern application teams. Being able to run the same artifact in many different environments simplifies delivery pipelines, increases confidence, and allows teams to deliver value faster. But containers alone may not be enough. Scaling out containers and running production workloads often requires additional technologies like a container scheduler or platform as a service.

  • How and why did you choose the components of your container environment? Tell us about your lab experiments.
  • How are you understanding the provenance and lineage of your containers? In other words, “what’s in the container?”
  • Are you working with hybrid clusters? What tools are you using for those workloads?
  • Has containerization impacted your development lifecycle time, Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR), and other productivity benchmarks?
  • What’s still missing from your container experience?

Modernizing The Team

An evolving technical ecosystem provides opportunities for your team to learn and grow. Teams approach these opportunities differently, depending on the culture of the organization. Some folks might want training, some want a place to experiment and learn on their own. Some come to ChefConf to learn directly from others who have been there. What has your team needed to do to keep up in the changing technical landscape?

  • Developer-supported oncall generates lots of discussion. Have you changed your oncall and response practices with your architectural changes?
  • Have you built a collaborative space for teams in your organization to come together and work on challenges together?
  • Has your team seen a significant shift in their roles, and how has that affected the folks who work on your team?
  • How has your organization approached building trust among teams with dependent projects?
  • Has your change in technical practices also affected your recruiting and hiring?

Other Tracks

The ChefConf CFP is open for the following tracks:

Share Your Story

Your story and experiences are worth sharing with the community. Help others learn and further your own knowledge through sharing. The ChefConf CFP is open now. Use some of the questions posed here to help form a talk proposal for the compliance automation track.

Submit your talk proposal now! The deadline is Friday, January 11, 2019 at 11:59 PM Pacific time.