ChefConf

“What do you mean, we don’t have configuration management?” Joining DramaFever’s ops team last year, we both came from orgs that used Chef, but initially we disagreed about which flavor of CM to use here. We cooperated to build awesome instead of vying for the upper hand. (Go go gadget devops.) We’ll discuss the initial concerns around going with Chef and how we addressed them.

DramaFever uses Docker extensively, but we found Dockerfiles aren’t enough to keep All The Things consistent. We need to predictably create and maintain the host instances and then launch containers in the right environment for our main Django app or any of our golang microservices. Using Chef along with other tools such as Packer, we’re beginning to bring order to dev, qa, monitoring, CI, and our AMI creation process as well as our entire application infrastructure.

We’ll detail how we’re reducing deployment overhead and increasing maintainability for our AWS-based video platform, which streams international content, documentaries, and horror to a rapidly growing worldwide audience. We will also share some of the pitfalls and corner cases we are working through in order to create our desired infrastructure.