100...hours? Wow, the documentation for Chef must really be bad because I guess I still don't know what it's meant to do, despite going through the Hello World process. I thought it was just a framework for the batch commands needed to set up a machine. What was the hardest part to feel comfortable with? The syntax? The conventions for maintaining and executing recipes?

Hi Danso, fundamentally Chef, CFEngine and Puppet are all Configuration Management (CM) systems. They are a programmatic way to specify what a "host" or group of "hosts" should look like using a dependency graph. Basically it builds the dependency graph and works from the root to the leaves one level at a time.

As an example let's say you want to install MongoDB on a new Ubuntu machine, you have the following dependencies in approximate order;

* Add MongoDB Apt Repo to apt list. * Add MongoDB repository key. * apt-get update. * apt-get install mongodb. * Configure /etc/mongodb.conf to your liking. * Restart mongodb.

Depending on how you implement it CM will allow you to make the process cookie cutter.

Want a new test environment? Spin one up and run your CM against the servers. Want to try that hot new cloud provider? Ditto.

I think it's worth the investment unless you're just doing apps that have a very short shelf life (e.g. marketing apps that live for no longer than a few months).

Kind Regards, Nathan

The documentation for Chef is not great, but what makes it problematic (at least when I was first learning it) is that it has a tendency to not correspond to the currently released version (sometimes it's outdated, but more annoyingly, sometimes it's pre-dated).