ChefConf Talk Spotlight: Scholastic’s Tech Transformation: Taking Servers from Pets to Cattle, Now with More Containers

Continuing our ongoing blog series highlighting all the fantastic talks, workshops, and sponsors at ChefConf 2015, today we’re focusing on our friend John Byrne from Scholastic and his talk, “Scholastic’s Tech Transformation: Taking Servers from Pets to Cattle, Now with More Containers”.

You may already be familiar with Scholastic’s journey from a traditional data center to an AWS-based, Chef-driven high-velocity infrastructure, but, if not, be sure to check out this video as a primer for John’s talk.

Now, about John’s talk. Here’s the rundown

A review of Scholastic’s technology transformation from bare-metal data center to fully-automated cloud infrastructure. In this session we’ll look at how Scholastic is integrating Chef with AWS CloudFormation and AutoScaling Groups to create complete application stacks in minutes. We’ll also discuss how we have integrated Docker into our cookbook development workflow, and our progress so far toward the goal of containerized applications in production.

John’s talk will include demos of Chef with CloudFormation and Chef with Docker. So, if you’re working at an organization looking to level-up your infrastructure and accelerate software delivery and/or you’re interested in Chef, Docker, AWS, or all of the above, this session is for you.

As for John himself, he leads the Lifecycle Automation team at Scholastic in NYC. He specializes in infrastructure, systems, and application deployment automation. During his last three years at Scholastic, he has progressed the infrastructure architecture from bare metal with little automation, to a fully automated hybrid cloud design, featuring Amazon Web Services, VMWare, and Chef.