Chef Community Summit in London

The Chef Community Summit is an event where Chef Inc. brings all its' users and contributors together. In 2018 it took place in Seattle and London. Attendees have the opportunity to learn more about Chef, share their experiences and network.

Edmund Haselwanter, CEO of Infralovers GmbH, invited his team to join the Chef Community Summit in London.

The Arrival

Our journey started pretty early in the morning as we took the bus from Graz to Vienna at 6:30 AM. From Vienna to London we took the plane and after our arrival, we went straight to our hotel. There we enjoyed some time with the team. We had a great lunch and a welcome drink.

In the evening Chef Inc. invited us to the pre-event of the Chef Community Summit. It was a great chance to get to know all the new team members of Chef Inc. and also to have some inspiring talks with well-known staff.

Chef Community Summit Day 1

Tuesday, 16th of October the Chef Community Summit finally started. After the registration and a delicious breakfast Mandi Walls, Technical Community Manager of Chef welcomed all attendees.

In the morning there was a great mix of Chef keynote presentations and customer stories.

Christoph Hartmann, Co-Creator of InSpec and Engineering Director and Alex Pop, Software Engineer of Chef gave a talk with the title: "InSpec - What's new!" With InSpec you can turn your compliance, security and other policy requirements into automated tests. InSpec 3 comes along with a lot of improvements:

• Advanced profile handling, scalability and a simplification in the editing of profiles
• Better reporting for aggregated profiles
• Extended cloud resources
• Google Cloud resource pack
• Ability to create your own resource packs
• Terraform integration

Nell Shamrell-Harrington, Principal Software Development Engineer of Chef introduced Habitat with her talk: "Higher. Faster. Stronger. Your Applications with Habitat". Habitat makes it easy to build, deploy, and manage portable, automated applications in any environment. Generally speaking, Habitat is a technology for packaging and running software. Because of the huge amount of applications and their dependencies it becomes difficult to manage them. Habitat is a great tool to overcome the pains of this.

In the afternoon Chef offered a great variety of workshops where we could deepen our knowledge about Chef Automate, Habitat and InSpec.

Afterwards, we joined the evening event to network with peers.

Chef Community Summit Day 2

The second day also started with an excellent mix of Chef Inc. presentations and customer stories.

Corey Scobie, SVP of Product and Engineering of Chef welcomed us in the morning with a great talk about the Chef Community. He also gave an overview of all Chef Inc. products and then handed over to the next talk.

Adrian Daniels and Tom Robinson-Gore, Solution Architects of Chef hold a talk with the title: "A year in the life of Chef Automate". Chef Automate helps you to deliver compelling software experiences by providing a unified view of everything you automate. It is a platform for unified control and visibility as you can configure infrastructure, manage application lifecycles and compliance reporting in it.

Jon Cowie, Principal Customer Architect hold the last Chef Inc. presentation. Under the title: "Habitat Managed Chef: Achieve Consistent Application Deployment." He showed us how to combine Chef with Habitat.

In the afternoon the Open Space Sessions started. It was a great chance to dive deeper into your favourite Chef topic and discuss with peers.

As time always flies when you have fun we already had to leave. On our way to the airport, we took the last picture of that amazing business trip. We gained a lot of knowledge, met old friends and got to know new awesome people. Thanks Chef. Inc for organising this event and thanks to Edmund for taking us there!