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Joshua Timberman

Joshua Timberman is a Code Cleric at CHEF, where he Cures Technical Debt Wounds for 1d8+5 lines of code, casts Protection from Yaks, and otherwise helps continuously improve internal technical process.


Reflecting on Six Years With Chef

This post originally appeared on jtimberman’s Code Blog. It actually started a bit over seven years ago. I saw the writing on the wall at IBM; my job was soon to be outsourced.

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Chef Reporting API and Resource Updates

This post originally appeared on jtimberman’s Code Blog. Have you ever wanted to find a list of nodes that updated a specific resource in a period of time? Such as “show me all the nodes in production that had an application service restart in the last hour”?

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Supermarket HTTPS Redirect Postmortem

Ohai Chefs! The new community site, Supermarket, was soft-launched in "beta" on Tuesday, June 17. When it was launched, we weren't enforcing HTTPS/SSL for the site. Yesterday, we deployed a change to enforce redirection from HTTP to HTTPS at the application level, which wound up loading a default Nginx page.

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Supermarket HTTPS Redirect – Public Postmortem Meeting

Earlier today, we deployed a change to force http->https redirect for Supermarket. During the deployment, the load balancer was incorrectly configured, causing Supermarket to be unavailable. At Chef, we conduct postmortem meetings for outages and issues with the site and services.

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Berkshelf API Remediation Followup

As you may be aware, on 2014-05-14, there was an outage to the Berkshelf API service that Berkshelf v3+ uses to resolve dependencies from the Community site. We posted previously a postmortem of the incident. I wanted to take a moment and follow-up with the community where we’re at with the remediation items.

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Hosted Enterprise Chef Search API Downtime

Ohai Chefs, Yesterday (2014-04-08) at 22:39 UTC to 23:16 UTC, Hosted Enterprise Chef search API requests were returning 502 HTTP response codes. One of the “killer features” of using a Chef Server is the search capability, so I know many of our customers rely on that API.

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Evolution of Cookbook Development

In this post, I will explore some development patterns that I’ve seen (and done!) with Chef cookbooks, and then explain how we can evolve to a new level of cookbook development. The examples here come from Chef’s new chef-splunk cookbook, which is a refactored version of an old splunk42 cookbook.

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Chef’s Splunk Cookbook

Today I’d like to share a cookbook that we’ve developed, chef-splunk. This cookbook replaces an old internal Splunk cookbook that has served us well for quite some time, but that one was becoming more difficult to modify and extend. There is a community splunk cookbook already.

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Automating IAM Credentials with Ruby and Chef

This post was originally published on SysAdvent. Chef, nee Opscode, has long used Amazon Web Services. In fact, the original iteration of “Hosted Enterprise Chef,” “The Opscode Platform,” was deployed entirely in EC2.

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Managing Secrets with Chef Vault

This post was originally published on jtimberman’s Code Blog Two years ago, I wrote a post about using Chef encrypted data bags for SASL authentication with Postfix.

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