Thanks for weighing in Spuder. I'm glad to hear that Chef is working out for you w/ the FE windows servers. I have no question around whether Chef works in Windows environment as a technology, but whether it succeeds in a Windows culture.
To make an analogy, if 10 years ago you'd come to me in my Linux shop and asked me to trust my automation to a tool running on, and built for, Windows, I would've been deaf and blind to any strengths of the tech as such, because the culture around operations would have been so foreign to me.
I worry that Chef brought in by management or a few enthusiasts to Windows-centered shops will fail because the dominant culture will be infertile ground, perhaps despite the best intentions of the dev&ops teams.
So, I'd like to know if there are case studies where Chef has succeed in shops with essentially zero Unix footprint. I posted the same question on Twitter and have two examples:
1 - MSN https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/DevOps-Dimension/3--MSN-and-Universal-Store-Combining-PaaS-with-Configuration-Management (Thanks to Matt Ray)
2 - NCR Corp (Thanks to Michael Hedgepeth)
Are those the only two? And what needed to happen internally for Chef to succeed? Michael already noted
@pburkholder I've found @chef to be an easy sell to development org, especially if I show them powershell integration
@pburkholder we are 90% windows - the *unix acceptance came before this - the traditional windows culture was the biggest barrier
Others ideas how to break through traditional windows culture?
Thanks! -Peter