HN user

makerbreaker

18 karma
Posts1
Comments11
View on HN

They aren't making 22k/yr is his point though. A US based dev, who is working 60 hours per week, and not making 50,000$+ is doing something wrong (or chose low pay for a cool company etc)

Im not clear on why you get better features.

I have a webapp that I built, that utilizes rackspace's API and chef. I have a chef server that I use for all my configuration management, I have a Rails app that I use to talk to my chef server to manipulate machines, or rackspace's api to spin up machines, and I am building "triggering" into it (low disk space, high CPU do X). I am able to change IP addresses, spin up a machine with a specific stack etc. Granted this isnt the default chef-server, but the ability to do all this stuff, and not be locked into AWS is there.

Chef 11 released 13 years ago

Another thing I think helps to explain how beneficial a good configuration management system is, especially if you have a good deal of systems, is to think of the servers as part of a botnet, and chef as the command and control.

Chef 11 released 13 years ago

Another benefit is abstracting away the management via a boxed in webapp. I manage about 2000 servers all running chef. Things like IPs, host files, firewall settings etc, are stored in databags, each server has its own databag that can be manipulated by a Rails app/the Spice gem (thanks Dan Ryan!). As someone who is tasked with managing all of this, along with bringing the less experienced employees up to speed, it is a way for me to normalize all of these things, and abstract things away enough that almost anyone can open a port up on any server, setup a rails app etc etc. And whomever takes over after me, will just have to read one set of docs, get an overview, and they should be able to follow the design patterns of how things are setup, much more easily then random ssh/bash scripts.