ChefConf 2018 is coming up quickly (May 23-25 in Chicago, IL): one of the key themes of this year’s conference is support for the major cloud platforms from Microsoft, AWS and Google. In the next few days I’ll focus on the content at ChefConf supporting these three clouds, from migration to operations to detecting and fixing defects in your cloud and hybrid app estates. Today, I’ll highlight some of the sessions for Microsoft-focused organizations. ChefConf attendees who are using or evaluating Microsoft Azure will find a deep set of sessions and content focused on automating and managing apps across your entire Microsoft infrastructure. We’re excited to have Microsoft as a Pinnacle sponsor for this year’s event (and the sponsoring host of this year’s Chef Community Celebration at House of Blues).
If you’re coming to ChefConf and looking to learn more about Chef support for Azure, .NET, Windows and more, check out these workshops and sessions.
Workshop: Recipe for Success: Automating with Chef on the Microsoft Platform (Advanced)
Modern organizations are increasingly running their Windows Server environments in the cloud. In this workshop, not only will you learn advanced techniques to make automating with Chef on the Windows platform a pleasure – we’ll discuss common patterns, practices, and tools that you should be using to automate and manage these workloads in the Azure cloud platform
Building and Running ASP.Net Applications in Habitat
Matt Wrock, Chef
You have likely heard about Habitat and may have seen how it adds automation to application stacks such as Node, Ruby or Java. This presentation will focus on what Habitat looks like in a Windows world. We will look at authoring a Powershell based plan and building a Habitat package inside of a Windows container based Habitat Studio. We will build a simple ASP.Net application designed to run on IIS consuming data from a Sql Server database. We will also be exporting this application to a Windows container. We will be highlighting areas where Habitat development differs on Windows, point out some possibly unexpected gotchas and introduce some Windows specific habitat plan development patterns. In the end, listeners should walk away with a clear picture of how Habitat can fit in to their Windows development workflow.
Production-Ready Kubernetes and Habitat in 45 Minutes
Joey Schluchter, Microsoft
Chef Habitat now natively supports Azure Container Registry (ACS) and Azure Container Service (AKS), so you can focus even more of your time on delivering value at the application layer. In this session we’re going to show you how to provision a fully-managed Kubernetes cluster on Azure Container Service, a managed Azure Container registry and then connect this into your Habitat workflow.
With AKS you can eliminate the complicated planning and deployment of fully orchestrated containerized applications with Kubernetes, while simplifying your monitoring and cluster management through auto upgrades and a built-in operations console.
Avoid being locked into any one vendor or resource. Continue to work with the tools you already know, such as Habitat and Helm, and move applications to any Kubernetes deployment. Integrate with your choice of container registry, including Azure Container Registry.
Global Scale Application Architecture with Habitat and Microsoft Azure
John Kerry and William Stewart, NCR
We’ll design a globally redundant ordering application with Microsoft Azure and Habitat. Using global traffic managers, Cosmos DB, and globally distributed virtual networks we’ll sketch together a hosting topology that’ll allow consumers to interact with our application with relatively low latency and with a high degree of fault tolerance. Using Habitat on this infrastructure will allow for a simple test \ build \ deploy pipeline and give us global delivery orchestration for free.
Developing the Essential macOS Cookbook at Microsoft
Jacob Zaval, Eric Hanko, Microsoft
We’ll tell the story of building our macOS community cookbook based on input from several members of the community at Community Summit, Lunch and Learns, and ChefConf 2017. Our experiences with developing specific, internal-use cookbooks for macOS led to a need for a centralized, heavily-tested core cookbook. Since the existing community cookbooks around macOS resources were designed for user workstation needs and not build and test environments, we created our own resources targeting developer needs.
We’ll also talk about the day to day workflow of using Chef to support Office for Apple platforms, from cookbook build and release on Visual Studio Team Services to deploy production systems on our on-premises Mac lab, to configuring developer workstations with Vagrant and Parallels. We’ll also discuss the issues and obstacles we overcame in developing Chef on macOS, and how we’ve helped paved these roads to be a bit easier.
Demo Theater: Accelerate Chef Development with VS Code and Continuous Integration
Eric Hanko & Eugene Chuvyrov, Microsoft
Life’s too short not to live without linting, snippets and continuous integration – think of all those cat videos you’re missing out on! In this session we’re going to show you how you can accelerate your development with Chef, InSpec and Habitat artifacts, no matter what Cloud or platform your deploying to, by leveraging Chef Extensions for Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio Team Services.
Visual Studio Code is a powerful, lightweight & open source code editor that runs on Linux, Mac and Windows. Visual Studio Team Services provides services for teams to share code, track work and ship software – supporting any language and any platform.
Register for ChefConf
Check out these sessions, and more, in the ChefConf 2018 Agenda. Haven’t registered yet? Sign up today!