Immediately following #ChefConf 2013, we teamed up with our friends from Joyent and Boundary to co-host a Chef Hack Day.
The idea: capture some of the excitement and buzz generated at #ChefConf and bring community members together to whip up some awesome code.
The results: About 70 Chefs gathered at Joyent’s offices and hacked on numerous projects.
Projects included work on:
- An extension to knife ec2 that allows you to pass a “\-\-bake” parameter to generate an EC2 AMI after bootstrapping the node.
- A vagrant plugin that allows you to use a local repository of packages to make truly disconnected provisioning possible.
- Launch a developer stack from a rake file. The full developer stack might include Berkshelf, minitest, chef spec, and more.
- A set of thor files, spiceweasel, and vagrant files to help bootstrap an arbitrary infrastructure. Checkout this repository on github.
- Improvements to Python PIP
- …and more
There was also a lot of work put into generating omnibus builds of Chef for both SmartOS and Free BSD.
Here’s a description of one of the projects:
We created Chef Stock to provide an extensible solution to inventory and expense management of infrastructure across disparate providers using chef nodes and attributes as our source of truth. We created a Django webui backed by a redis cache, which is populated from chef server. Node attributes for price and location will be used to display filterable tables and maps, which will allow us to easily see what we are spending on and where our nodes are located geographically, precise to the rack slot. In the long term we hope to add better virtualization support, create API-to-node attribute importers for Internap and Amazon and integrate with monitoring (sensu/momonitor), metrics (graphite), and provisioning systems (openstack/razor) in order to create a more encompassing infrastructure management dashboard. MoMonitor is a monitoring and alerting system we recently released open source.
MoMonitor is a monitoring and alerting system that integrates with multiple services including umpire, graphite, and sensu. We recently released it as open source.
Our friends from DYN were on-site with their uptime cart keeping all of the hackers well caffeinated.
Boundrary provided food throughout the day and gave away Raspberry Pis to three lucky winners:
- Rob McQueen
- Kristina Vlaardingerbrooch
- Robert Maury
This was the first time we tried a post-#ChefConf Hack Day but certainly will not be the last!
Thank you to all who participated.