Configuration management with Chef

Config management shouldn't just be for people who are deploying hundreds of nodes. Config management is about tracking your config as part of the app.

Many configuration management tools exist - cfengine, bcfg2, Puppet and Chef. Notable Drupal projects are already using these tools. Pantheon uses bcfg2 and Acquia hosting uses Puppet. Far too few developers in the Drupal community use these tools and adoption could provide substantial benefit to many developers.

While there is far more to configuration management than can be covered in a single talk, this presentation will focus on what makes Chef different from other config management tools, such as the ability to override cookbooks, the hosted repository of cookbooks and the chef-solo tool, which can be used to configure a system in the absence of a chef server.

We will create a simple cookbook (perhaps something like install and configuration of Drush and Drupal core).