Chef series 0 WIP

Signed-off-by: Maxime “pep” Buquet <pep@bouah.net>

content/posts/chef-series-0.md

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+---
+title: "Catching up with Chef"
+date: 2018-08-31T12:00:00+01:00
+author: "pep."
+tags: [Configuration Management, Chef, Collabora]
+---
+
+When I arrived at [Collabora][0], I was introduced to [Chef][1]. At the time I
+did know a bit of [Ansible][2], that I had used here and there for personal
+projects. Both are [configuration mangement systems][3].
+
+[0]: https://collabora.com
+[1]: https://chef.io
+[2]: https://ansible.com
+[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Configuration_management
+
+Every company has a technical debt lurking around the corner, and for us it
+was, and still is the case with our so-called Chef _cookbooks_, and _recipes_.
+
+To place this beginning of a rant in context, at Collabora we use Debian
+extensively. We employ a fair number of Debian Developers, and it is not
+uncommon to have debianisms taken for granted internally.
+
+At the time, Jessie was still stable, and had (has) _chef 11.12.8-2_, Stretch
+arrived a few months later, with _chef 12.14.60-2_ packaged. The server
+part of chef is not packaged, but there is an alternative implementation
+called _goiardi_ that we use. It plans to implement chef-server 12 when
+reaching 1.0.
+Meanwhile, the official project has released _chef 14.3.42_, and _chef-server
+12.17.69_ at the time of writing, with plenty of new features, but also bug
+fixes, that I would love to be able to benefit from.
+
+To add to this, we do not test our cookbooks automatically, and the only
+viable way to test changes is to actually deploy them and run the client. Good
+fun.
+
+We use a client/server architecture. We don't use chef-zero. _why?_
+
+---
+
+I'm going to fix a few objectives to myself to:
+
+- update at least the chef-client that we use on stretch
+- get rid of jessies
+- setup test with CI on gitlab
+
+And report all that.
+
+## Objectives
+
+I already started cleaning up the repository:
+
+> added lines: <span style="color: green;">10712</span> removed lines: <span style="color: red;">26589</span> total lines: -15877
+
+I was the one to commit most of the cookbooks when I arrived, because they
+weren't versioned, which explains the huge number of added lines.
+
+---
+
+I am not going to release all sources for what I do unfortunately, but I will
+try to detail the steps of how I did it for each part of the objectives.