Chef: Automation at Scale
Idempotent cookbooks, infrastructure as code, compliance enforcement. Manage hundreds of nodes with Chef—consistent, auditable, compliant.
What we deliver with Chef
Cookbook standards
Tested cookbooks with clear attribute contracts and wrapper patterns, so site-specific configuration lives apart from community code.
Roles and environments
Node classification that reflects real purpose, with dev, staging, and production attributes separated rather than branched inside recipes.
Test-driven cookbooks
ChefSpec and Test Kitchen runs before a cookbook reaches nodes, because a failed converge on production is a very expensive test.
Compliance as code
InSpec profiles that produce audit evidence automatically, which is usually the reason Chef is still in the estate.
Migration path
A pragmatic split: containers or managed services for new workloads, Chef kept where the VM fleet genuinely needs it.
How we work with Chef
Chef estates usually carry years of accumulated exception. We inventory nodes by role, identify snowflakes that no cookbook can describe, and rebuild those nodes from code before touching anything else.
Then we standardise: wrapped community cookbooks, attribute contracts, and Kitchen tests in CI. For teams moving to containers we migrate workload by workload, keeping Chef for the machines that still need it instead of forcing a rewrite.
Chef in production: where it breaks
The same handful of problems show up on almost every engagement. Naming them early is cheaper than discovering them at 2am.
Snowflake nodes nobody can rebuild
Hand-edited servers drift until a failure cannot be reproduced. Rebuilding from cookbooks and retiring exceptions restores predictability.
Attribute precedence confusion
The same setting is overridden three levels deep, so behaviour depends on run order. Explicit contracts and wrapper cookbooks make precedence readable.
Untested cookbooks on production nodes
A converge is not a test. Kitchen runs plus staged rollouts catch breakage before the fleet converges.
When to use Chef
VM fleets in regulated environments with compliance evidence requirements.
Hybrid estates modernising gradually rather than all at once.
Organisations with a working Chef investment that needs standardising.