Author:
Julian Dunn
Julian is a former Chef employee
DevOps Against Inhumanity: Uniting To Put Technology First
By Julian Dunn
Several weeks ago I had the pleasure of giving my talk “DevOps Against Inhumanity” at the first-ever DevOpsDays Toronto. Toronto’s actually my hometown, so it was fun to return and see what’s changed, both in technology and with the city. What is “DevOps Against Inhumanity?
Read moreAnnouncing Chef Server High Availability and Replication
By Julian Dunn
Today I’m thrilled to announce two new add-ons for Chef Server 12: Chef Server High Availability and Chef Server Replication. These two features are among the most-frequently requested product enhancements and allow customers to geographically distribute highly-available Chef server clusters while maintaining a single view for Chef content – cookbooks, roles, environments, and data bags.
Read moreWebinar: Migrating Enterprise IT to AWS
By Julian Dunn
Here at Chef we have the privilege to share all kinds of innovation, community news and compelling events with you via the blog. I’m particularly happy to invite you to a webinar we’re hosting this week with Scholastic.
Read moreFrom Solo to Zero: Migrating to Chef Client Local Mode
By Julian Dunn
Chef Solo was the original Chef. Remember the bad old days before the Chef server existed as a product, and the only way to use Chef was to scp (or worse, ftp) giant tarballs of recipes & cookbooks from system to system?
Read moreImmutable Infrastructure: Practical or Not?
By Julian Dunn
With the continued popularity of Docker and containerization generally, the concept of immutable infrastructure has again come to the fore. Immutable infrastructure is generally defined as a stack that you build once (be it a virtual machine image, container image, or something else), run one or many instances of, and never change again.
Read moreMicrosoft TechEd 2014: A Chef’s-eye View
By Julian Dunn
Chef had a significant presence at Microsoft TechEd two weeks ago. TechEd is Microsoft’s annual user conference with 15,000 attendees (yup, you read that right — so about 15x the size of ChefConf).
Read morePlan, Build, Run: Please Don’t
By Julian Dunn
Several months ago, McKinsey & Company released a report entitled “The enterprise IT infrastructure agenda for 2014” which offers strategic advice to CIOs and other IT managers for 2014.
Read moreWriting Libraries in Chef Cookbooks
By Julian Dunn
One of the most useful extensions available to Chef cookbook authors is the ability to write and use any arbitrary Ruby code as a library. These libraries are often no more than a few lines long, but can also be as simple or as sophisticated as you want.
Read moreWhy I love working at Chef
By Julian Dunn
This post originally appeared on Julian Dunn’s blog. I started my job at Opscode Chef a little over a year ago, on March 4, 2013. I admit that job-wise, I have a short attention span. Usually by this point in a technology job, I’m getting antsy and bored, but not at Chef.
Read moreAttributes or data bags: what should I use?
By Julian Dunn
In a way, building IT infrastructure isn’t particularly exciting. Want to turn a Linux server into a MySQL database server? Enter some commands to install MySQL. Congratulations, you have successfully used some data (yum -y install mysql-server) to change the generic model (the out-of-the-box operating system). Much of our infrastructure is built the same way.
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