Chef Gets Gobbled Up (Whiteboard Confessional)

Transcript

Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Catchpoint look, 80% of performance and availability issues don't occur within your application code in your data center itself. It occurs well outside those boundaries. So it's difficult to understand what's actually happening. What Catchpoint does is makes it easier for enterprises to detect, identify, and of course validate how reachable their application is. And of course, how happy their users are. It helps you get visible and to reach a bit availability, performance, reliability, of course, absorbency. Cause we'll throw that one in too. And it's used by a bunch of interns and companies you may have heard of like, you know, Google, Verizon, Oracle, but don't hold that against them. And many more. To learn more, visit www.catchpoint.com and tell them Cory sent you, wait for the wince.

Welcome to the AWS Morning Brief: Whiteboard Confessional, now with recurring perpetual guest, Pete Cheslock. Pete, how are you?

Pete: I'm back again.

Corey: So, today I want to talk about something that really struck an awful lot of nerves across, well, the greater internet. You know, the mountains of thought leadership, otherwise known as Twitter. Specifically, Chef has gotten itself acquired.

Pete: Yeah, I saw some, I guess you would call them, sub-tweets from some Chef employees before it was announced, which is kind of common, where responses ranged from, “Oh, that's something new,” to, “Welp.” And I've thought it—I was like, “Wow, that's interesting.” Of course, then I start looking for news of what happened, of which we all found out not long after.

Corey: Before we go into it, let's set the stage here because it turns out not everyone went through the battles of configuration management circa 2012 to 2015 or so—at least in my experience. What did Chef do? What was the product that Chef offered? Who the heck are they?

Pete: So, Chef, they were kind of a fast follower in the configuration management space to another very popular tool that I'm sure people have used out there called Puppet. Actually, interestingly enough, the founders of Chef ran a consulting company that was doing Puppet consulting; they were helping companies use Puppet. And both of those tools really came from yet another tool called CFEngine, which in many ways—depending on who you ask—it's kind of considered the original configuration management, the one that had probably the earliest, largest usage. But it was very difficult to use. CFEngine was not something that was easy, it had a really high barrier to entry, and tools like Puppet and Chef, they came out around the, let's say 2007, 8, 9 10 timeframe, were written in Ruby which was a little bit easier of a programming language to get up and running with. And this solved a problem for a lot of companies who needed to configure and manage lots of servers easily.

Corey: And there are basically four companies in here that really nailed it for this era; you had Puppet, Chef, Salt, and Ansible. And in the interest of full disclosure, I was a very early developer behind SaltStack, and I was a traveling contract trainer for Puppet for a while. I never got deep into Chef myself for a variety of reasons. First and foremost was that its configuration language was fundamentally Ruby, and my approach back then—because I wasn't anything approaching a developer—was that if I need to learn a full-featured programming language at some point, well, why wouldn't I just pivot to becoming, instead, a developer in that language and not have to worry about infrastructure? Instead, go and build applications and then work nine to five and not get woken up in the middle of the night when something broke. That may have been the wrong direction, but that was where I sat at the time.

Pete: Yeah, I came at it from a different world. So, I had worked for a startup that no one has probably really ever heard of, unless you have met me before, like, know who I am, but a company called Sonian which was very early in the cloud space. It was email archiving, so it wasn't anything particularly mind-blowingly interesting because it's compliant email archiving, but what was interesting is that we were really early in the cloud space, and a lot of the tools that people use today just didn't exist for managing cloud servers. It was 2008, 2009, pretty early, EC2 timeframe. How would you provision your EC2 instance, back then? Maybe you use CFEngine, maybe use Puppet. 

And actually, interestingly enough, that company—Sonian—was originally a Puppet shop because Chef didn't exist yet. And there were a series of issues we ran into, technical capabilities that Puppet just couldn't do for us at the time. And again, that time being 2009, 2010, and a lot of the very early Chef team, founding team, early engineers, were really working with us very closely to bootstrap our business on Chef writing a lot of those original cookbooks that became community cookbooks. And so, my intro into Chef and the Chef community is a lot earlier than most, and I went a lot deeper with it just by nature of being so early into that space.

Corey: One of the things that struck me despite not being a Chef aficionado myself was, first, just how many people in the DevOps sphere were deeply tied into that entire ecosystem. And two, love or hate whatever the product, or company, et cetera, did, some of the most empathetic people I've ever met were closely tied to Chef’s orbit. So, I have not publicly commented until now on Chef getting acquired, just because I'm trying to give the people who are in that space, time to, I guess, I don't know if grieve is the right word, but it's important to me that I don't have a whole lot to say there, and it's very easy for me to say something that comes across as crass, or not well thought out, or unintentionally insulting to a lot of very good people. So, I'm sitting here on the sidelines watching it and more or less sitting this one out, but it's deeply affected enough people that I wanted to talk about it here.

Pete: Yeah. And I'm glad that we are taking this opportunity to talk about it a bit. I had a lot of thoughts and feels. I tried to write a blog post about this to try to get them down somewhere, and a couple of paragraphs into it, I just, I really couldn’t… it just seemed like a meandering random mess of words without any real destination. But a few people online have mentioned this, and I'll definitely call it out as well, which is that Chef was, it was a tool. It was a tool like any other. You either loved it or you hated it. If you hated it, you probably really loved Ansible, or you really loved Puppet. It was a really, kind of, Vim versus Emacs feel to it, where you either we're all in on it or not.

But the thing that I think Chef really brought for me is not only leveling up my career in a way that I would not be where I'm at today if it wasn't for that tool and that community, but just how genuine everyone was within that community, and the interactions that we had at conferences, at Chef conferences, DevOps conferences and things of that nature, and even continued the conversations online back before Slack, which it's hard to even remember that: when we all were on IRC, and we were in the Chef IRC channel, and it was a fantastic channel with a ton of people who would dive in and help you out on your Chef problems....