Chef at DevOpsDays Raleigh

The Event

Chef was a Gold sponsor of DevOpsDays Raleigh on October 6th and 7th at the McKimmon Center. This inaugural event was a wild success with a strong showing from members of the local Triangle DevOps Meetup group.

The Presentations

Our Chef engineering manager, Mark Mzyk, emceed the event and kicked off DevOpsDays Raleigh with a warm welcome.

Michael DeHaan presented a fantastic keynote on “Speaking for the Dead: Is ‘Waterlfall’ and ‘Monolithic’ Actually Good?”. This is a very important topic because it critically analyzes these methodologies and pits them against the new Agile methods.

Many fantastic speakers followed touching on topics such as the business value of the DevOps movement, having stress free outages, and the love/hate relationship of continuous integration.

On day two, Aaron Suggs presented an epic keynote on “Context & Contingency: Patterns for choosing good tools”. Other talks highlighted how to evolve your DevOps skills, embracing containers, and the idea that tooling isn’t just about picking the best tech.

Ignite Talks

Ignite talks are a dynamic and fast paced way to ingest cool and fun topics. This was my second time watching and first time participating in such an exciting framework. I did a talk on “Data before DevOps” or how to sell yourself and ideas internally.

"Change is very expensive."

Being the first time I’ve participated, this was an incredibly nerve racking event. I wanted to participate to build my speaking skill set and also enable people to sell their ideas internally. Other highlights from Ignites were Maggie Gourlay’s – “My Gaming Days weren’t Wasted: How Gaming Trained me for Testing in DevOps” and Gabe Ortiz’s – “Database Automation is Hard”.

Chef Booth

Visitors to our booth were very interested in our newly released platform, Chef Automate. There was also a lot of talk around Habitat for application automation and ways to automate compliance. The people we met with are very interested in the future of Habitat and the ability to scan machines with code at velocity.

Chef at DevOpsDays Raleigh

We enjoyed meeting our booth mates and quite a few people who have never heard of Chef before. They were eager to hear about the concepts of infrastructure as code, continuous integration and continuous delivery.

Get Involved

Fraser Pollock

Fraser Pollock is a Solutions Architect focused on spreading the love of Chef and the automation of all the things. He is based in Boston Mass and working hard to introduce companies to the Dev Ops methodologies.