Our DevOps story: Chef + Rails for customer cloud control

Abstract:

In our hosting company, we use Chef to manage all user and web app configuration on our shared and private hosting environments. We've put this power in the hands of our end users through Sock, our control panel. What first started out as an automation tool for managing new servers, is now our core server configuration tool for us as well as our customers and their customers. Where a DirectAdmin, cPanel or Plesk failed in giving us an overhead management is where our Sock + Chef solution picked up. With Ruby Developers and Sysadmins literally at the same table, we were able to concurrently build the two sides of this story.

Our talk will show how we use Chef to continuously manage not only the servers but everything on it (accounts, webapps, ssh keys, Solr, Varnish, databases, …). We want to show how we use Chef in a dynamic way to shuffle and manage user- and web app configurations across a large pool of shared and dedicated servers.

Speaker:

Steven De Coeyer and Joren De Groof

Steven (Ops) and Joren (Dev) work at Openminds, a Belgian B2B hosting company offering custom cloud solutions.