Meeting notes for February 4th, 2021

Community Meetings
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Below are the meeting notes for this week's Community Meeting, a text-based meeting held weekly in Community Meetings on our community slack, which you can join: https://community-slack.chef.io/

DevRel/Community

benny Vasquez shared

I’m gonna jump in to a devrel update. We’ve got a blog post with a ton more information getting through the pipelines now, but we’ve got some big news! Our Chef Principles Certification exam has been added to Learn Chef. When completed, you certification will be valid for 2 years. A few questions I know will come up immediately:

  • It’s free. We are happily offering Chef Principles for free! Future, more advanced certification exams may require a fee to participate.
  • It’s timed. You’ll have about 90 minutes to complete it in one sitting.
  • If you score less than 70% of the exam (the passing score), you will need to wait about 48 hours to re-take it.
  • Reminder: You can always view and share your Learn Chef awards at badges.chef.io .

I’ll share more when the blog post goes out, but let me know if you’ve questions!

This week’s releases

Chef Workstation

benny Vasquez shared

Chef Workstation got and update with the news version of Infra client, Inspec, Test Kitchen, and Kitchen Inspec Verifier last Thursday: https://discourse.chef.io/t/chef-workstation-21-1-247-released/19502

Other releases

benny Vasquez shared

Cookstyle 7.6 was released with a new cop for DeprecatedConstants: https://discourse.chef.io/t/cookstyle-7-6-released-with-1-new-ruby-cop/19504

We have two new Bento boxes, too. One for the new AlmaLinux 8 (beta) (one of the new CentOS alternatives), and one for Ubuntu 21.04 .

Another thing to note is more of a Docs update that was shared last night. I’m just gonna quote @tas50 from some internal communication, ’cause he used good words.

Previously we talked about the language you use to code Chef Infra as the Recipe DSL and heavily leaned in on that being Ruby. We’ve renamed the Recipe DSL to the Chef Infra Language, which better describes what it really is. That language is a combination of the resources we ship and a large number of helpers for using those resources. A new Chef Infra Language section in the docs https://docs.chef.io/infra_language/ includes sidebar sections for Infra language helpers. These have greatly expanded and we’re going to continue documenting all the hidden helpers in Chef Infra Client until the docs are the absolute reference.

Updates

Chef Automate

benny Vasquez shared

Over last week, the Automate team has focused on two major work items:

  1. The chef server infra proxy in Automate, backend and UI changes
  2. Refresh of the compliance profiles with fixes and update to the content

Chef Infra Client

tas50 shared

  • Prepping the 16.10 release (real soon)
  • Merged the ability to document actions in custom resources
  • Digging into M1 builds
  • Still working on the upgrade to Ruby 3
  • Released new win32-certstore gem with the ability to manage the user's cerstore in addition to the system
  • Added support for alma linux to ohai as part of the rhel platform family and we also have almalinux bento boxes for virtualbox, parallels, and vmware now
  • Merged in the removal of the legacy windows service manager. This completes our migration of running chef-client as a windows scheduled task

Chef Infra Server

prajakta shared

## Done:

  • Merged PR #2203 from our community member @achinthagunasekara. Fixes the package paths in the Makefile. Thank you!
  • Updated chef 12.12.22 -> 15.15.1
  • Updated docs to reflect some end of year EOL's
  • We fixed some of the test scenarios for the integration testing pipeline.

## In flight:

  • Not much to update regarding the Rails change, we are working through some of the license changes there.
  • We fixed some issue with respect to the Chef-Infra-Server and Automate dev-env.
  • Started looking into #2181, enabling data-collector in Automate should work even if automate is not running. We have a fix for the issue, currently being tested.
  • #2214 The option to add version for the _status endpoint is optional.
  • Work is in progress to add support for external elasticsearch 7. We currently have the omnibus definition and omnibus related support for es7. Working on making the necessary changes related to the query.

That is all for us! Thank you and have a wonderful week everyone!

Chef Workstation

mparadise shared

  • resuming work on performance improvements and CLI refactoring. This will be especially helpful on Windows, because when this work is done it means that you don't have to wait forever for chef shell-init to run. It also lays the groundwork for future targeted improvements.
  • started work on adding MacOS platform support to chef-run
  • Team started diving into electron to begin improvements to the Workstation app
  • Merged the initial use case support for Rollouts

Sous Chefs

ramereth shared

Hello from Sous Chefs!

Here's the list of new releases in the past week:

  • freebsd - 1.1.0: Sous Chefs Adoption / Fix issue with port_options not working
  • golang - 4.1.1: Use node['golang']['scm'] and node['golang']['scm_packages'] attributes in default recipe.
  • ntp - 3.9.0: Sous Chefs Adoption / Now with Windows and MacOS testing!
  • ntp - 3.9.1: Remove duplicated source attributes in cookbook_file for leapfile_url
  • postgresql - 8.2.0: Makes psqlrc optional when invoking psql_command_string
  • users - 5.6.0: Sous Chefs Adoption / Fixes for MacOS and also testing
  • vault - 5.0.2: Update metadata supported platforms

We were able to figure out how to test FreeBSD using Github Actions. Apparently the MacOS instances have VirtualBox+Vagrant installed and full virtualization, so it should work as-is with the kitchen-vagrant plugin. Take a look at the freebsd cookbook for a working example.

This would be useful for other platforms that don't work well with dokken but do work with VirtualBox.

Some notable upcoming releases I've been working on and would like some feedback on:

We're also still working through the long list of imported cookbooks and getting them cleaned up and properly cleaned up. We're working on them in order of popularity based on the Supermarket API.

Cinc Updates

ramereth shared

Hello from the Cinc Project!

It's been a fairly quiet week.

Cinc Workstation

  • Released 21.1.247 via unstable channel

Cinc Server

  • Still need to address the build failure from last week
  • Upstream is planning a new release soon that we'll make a release for once it's out.

See you next week!

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Hi @bennyvasquez

Could you update the link? It's currently broken - thanks!

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Good catch! Updated in the post. This is where it was supposed to point: Chef Principles Certification Exam | Learn Chef

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