ChefConf

When we first began using chef at Parse, we fell in love with it. Chef became our source of truth for everything. Bootstrapping, config files, package management, deploying software, service registration & discovery, db provisioning and backups and restores, cluster management, _everything_. But at some point we reached Peak Chef and realized our usage model was starting to cause more problems than it was solving for us. We still love the pants off of chef, but it is not the right tool for every job in every environment. I'll talk about the evolution of Parse's chef infrastructure, what we've opted to move out of chef, and some of the tradeoffs involved in using chef vs other tools.