Last week we held our third annual Chef Community Summit in London. It was a sell-out event attended by 160 members of our community, both open source users and commercial customers. Our community in EMEA is a mix of folks from different industries and countries. We had attendees from 14 countries join us in London this year!
The Format
The Summit format in London is a bit different from the event running next week in Seattle. We know that it’s challenging for our European community members to travel to the US for ChefConf. Therefore, we decided to make the format of the European Summit more like a DevOpsDays event. It’s a two-day, single track of talks in the morning, then open spaces in the afternoon. This gives us a chance to showcase news and improvements to our projects, while also highlighting some of our community members and what they’ve been doing with Chef.
The Presentations
This year Nathen Harvey, VP of Community Development, kicked off the event with an update on the Chef community. He covered topics like the DCO, Community Slack, and Discourse, as well as tips for sharing conferences with colleagues back in the office.
Our community portion featured talks from Criteo, Danske Bank, Capital One, niu Solutions, SkyBet, and Fastly. These companies offered a variety of examples of how folks are using Chef in different kinds of environments, and at different milestones in their project lifecycle.
Criteo has been using Chef for a long time. Robert Vaznaver shared the story of how they took over the Mesos and Marathon cookbooks. Gary from niu Solutions is newer to Chef, and it was really great for us to hear that someone who was brand new to Chef and the Chef Community at last year’s Summit came back to share his story with us this year.
The other morning talks featured our open-source projects: Habitat, InSpec, and updates on what’s new in Chef. We also introduced the latest improvements to our commercial platform, Chef Automate.
Open Spaces
Our venue this year supported five rooms for open spaces, so we had 20 total discussions about all things Chef and Chef-related. We’ve collected the notes in a github project here so you can see what sorts of things folks in the Chef EMEA community are thinking about. Habitat was a popular topic, as was CI/CD, and Building an Internal Chef Community. Steve Murawski also led sessions on Chef on Windows AND Habitat on Windows!
Highlights
Overall, Summit was a great event, full of lots of interesting discussions and networking. InSpec and Habitat were cited as things people were excited to try out when they returned to their offices. We’re looking forward to having community talks about them at next year’s Summit.
Some other thoughts from the closing circle were high praise for the food at the venue (it was excellent! Thanks etc venues!), being able to get questions answered, and helping groups new to Chef talk through their plans with experienced groups.
Stay in Touch
We didn’t record the talks, but the slides we have been able to make available are on slideshare.net. Thanks again to all of our community speakers! Keep in touch until next year by joining our community slack. We look forward to seeing you there!
