# Meeting Notes for Jan 30, 2020

**URL:** <https://discourse.chef.io/t/meeting-notes-for-jan-30-2020/16604>\
**Category:** Community Meetings\
**Created:** [January 30, 2020, 6:32pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/meeting-notes-for-jan-30-2020/16604 "2020-01-30T18:32:20Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![bennyvasquez](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.chef.io/bennyvasquez/32/2559_2.png) [@bennyvasquez](https://discourse.chef.io/u/bennyvasquez)\
**Post date:** [January 30, 2020, 6:32pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/meeting-notes-for-jan-30-2020/16604/1 "2020-01-30T18:32:21Z")

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Meeting Notes below, but first... This one wasn’t mentioned during the meeting, but I wanted to point to it anyway: tecRacer is hosting its first Chef meetup in Frankfurt, Germany. If you’re close, definitely stop next Tuesday.

### Long story short

- Location: WeWork Frankfurt, Neue Rothofstrasse 13-19
- When: 4 February 2020, 6:30 pm (18:30)

### The Agenda

- Introductions
- Tech-Talk: _Delivering high quality cookbooks with test-kitchen_
- Discussion and networking
- Searching for other hosts

Full details on the blog: [https://blog.chef.io/upcoming-first-chef-usergroup-germany/](https://blog.chef.io/upcoming-first-chef-usergroup-germany/)

**DevRel/Community**

tas50 shared:

_The date is fast approaching (TOMORROW!) so if you have an idea for a talk get the proposal in, otherwise I’ll be taking your speaking slot in London._

[_https://www.chefconf.io/_](https://www.chefconf.io/)

[_https://www.chefconf.io/seattle/speak/_](https://www.chefconf.io/seattle/speak/)

_And if you’re thinking “I really don’t have anything special to talk about” you should check out_ [_@lnxchk_](https://chefcommunity.slack.com/team/U1QLC40JD) _’s series on topics. There’s some excellent advice there that might inspire you._ [_https://blog.chef.io/tag/chefconf/_](https://blog.chef.io/tag/chefconf/)

benny vasquez shared

_Registration is also open for ChefConf!_

# This week’s releases

**Automate**

tas50 shared

_First off Automate 2 20200123225613 shipped. With this release the Applications Dashboard is now generally available. This is some pretty cool work for shifting how you display and manage your infra so definitely take a look. The release also has some pretty significant improvements to the IAVv2 beta, which is rapidly approaching its GA date as well. Lot’s of fancy new stuff in Automate._ [_https://discourse.chef.io/t/automate-2-version-20200123225613-released/16581_](https://discourse.chef.io/t/automate-2-version-20200123225613-released/16581)

**Chef Infra**

tas50 shared

_We released Chef Infra Client 15.7.30 (then 31, then 32) with a pile of resource fixes and improvements and new cookbook helpers for checking if a system is a windows server, windows server core, or windows desktop._ [_https://discourse.chef.io/t/chef-infra-client-15-7-30-released/16573_](https://discourse.chef.io/t/chef-infra-client-15-7-30-released/16573)

_The .31 and .32 releases were to fixup warnings that were showing when using knife in the Chef Infra Package. If you don’t run knife via the Chef Infra package then you’re fine with staying on .30_

**Cookstyle**

tas50 shared

_Cookstyle 5.20 also shipped with a single new cop for cleaning up old ChefSpecs and improvements to detection / autocorrection in a few existing cops:_ [_https://discourse.chef.io/t/cookstyle-5-20-0-released/16576_](https://discourse.chef.io/t/cookstyle-5-20-0-released/16576)

**Chef Workstation**

tas50 shared

_Next up in Chef Workstation 0.15 which includes updated Chef Infra Client, Berkshelf, and InSpec. This is also the first version of Workstation that we’re building for Debian so if you were holding onto DK for the Debian support, it’s time to upgrade now. We’re also fully notarizing the Mac builds with signing of each binary. This is a requirement of Apple’s starting early Feb and it provides addition package security._

**ChefDK**

tas50 shared

_ChefDK 4.7 shipped after a bit of time off. We shipped three Chef Workstation releases during the time between 4.6 and 4.7 so this is pretty big one. As always I’d highly recommend using Workstation instead as it’s DK + more. This release comes with updates to tools like Chef Infra Client, Chef InSpec, Cookstyle (7 releases newer), berkshelf, and various knife/kitchen plugins._ [_https://discourse.chef.io/t/chefdk-4-7-73-released/16592_](https://discourse.chef.io/t/chefdk-4-7-73-released/16592)

**Habitat**

tas50 shared

_And last, but not least the Habitat team had a major milestone this week with the release of Habitat 1.5:_ [_https://blog.chef.io/product-announcement-chef-habitat-1-5-now-available/_](https://blog.chef.io/product-announcement-chef-habitat-1-5-now-available/) _._

# Other updates

**Automate**

Alex Pop shared

- _We moved IAMv2 to General Availability!_
- _We moved the Apps page to General Availability!_
- _Bug fixes and improvements to the EAS Dashboard._
- _InSpec Waivers almost complete in the backend._
- _New and updated compliance profiles have been merged._
- _Improvements to documentation and release notes_
- _Continuing with the refactoring and cleanup_
- _Making improvements to the Data Feed service_

**Chef**

tas50 shared

_On the Chef side of things we forked for Chef 16 so you’ll notice some breaking changes getting merged. We’ve officially removed support for RHEL 5, SLES 11, and Windows 2008 R2 from our codebase. There were a good number of if/else statements that can go away now. Faster code that’s easier to read. We also added new Windows helpers: windows\_nt\_version and powershell\_version. These return version objects so you can compare them without the need for .to\_i or .to\_f._

**Inspec**

cwolfe shared

_Well if last week was a quiet week, we sure made up for it this week._  
_The InSpec Team is up to:_

- _Merged PR enabling the_ archive _subcommand to work better in airgapped environements_
- _Fixed 4 skipped Windows functional tests_
- _Working on telemetry opt-in, continued_
- _Adding first telemetry instrumentation: invocation (duration, platform, installation type, command used)_
- _Adoption of a long-awaited PR to update the schema used to validate the JSON emitted by InSpec_
- _Corrected platform support declarations on several resources (e.g. not just linux, all of unix, in several cases)_
- shell _command - add_
  - _-inspect_ _option allowing you to get debugging information when you stringify a resource_

- _Detect how InSpec is installed by looking at its install path and a few other hints_
- _Refactor the crontab resource parsing code_
- _Prep for MacOS package notarization_

_Overall, a great week; we're overdue for a release as we now have several features and bugfixes on master._

**Habitat**

sdmacfarlane shared

_A number of the team has been heads down on some emergent work, but it's still been a pretty big week for us:_

- _Released 1.5!_
- _Improving service updates in the supervisor_
- _Improving safety of origin deletion_
- _Research spike into running bldr in K8s ( what are the rough edges?)_
- _Adding additional end-to-end tests for the supervisor_
- _Investigating db call performance_
- _Continuing investigations into visualizing the package graph_

**Workstation**

afiune shared

The Workstation Team have moved forward with the proposal to create distributable Go binaries, we will be done with this task today! We have also replaced

logify inside the stove gem in favor of mixlib-log, as Tim would say, one less dependency into the package! We are also working on some bug fixes and making the Chef Workstation App to run at boot time. Finally, the team has been working on two main proposals for the upcoming work for this year:

- [https://github.com/chef/chef-workstation/pull/877](https://github.com/chef/chef-workstation/pull/877)
  - Upgrade suggestions (Data Analysis)

- [https://github.com/chef/chef-analyze/pull/158](https://github.com/chef/chef-analyze/pull/158)
  - Chef CLI Catalog (v2.0)

Please, feel free to read and leave comments. Thanks to everyone contributing in the community!

**Chef Infra Server**

prajakta shared

- _For chef-infra server we continue to add more scenarios to the release testing infrastructure. We also have a pipeline now that can run all of these scenarios on a more regular basis._
- _The work in migrating to internal elasticsearch currently in review and testing phase._
- _We have started looking into v4 signing for requests to amazon s3._

_We are also seeing some community contributions for the Chef-Server repo, which is awesome and we are very thankful!_

**Chef Knife**

tas50 shared

I also have some Chef / Workstation cross cutting work on tracking down knife performance bottlenecks. It looks like most of our issues were from the way knife cloud plugins were loading their SDKs. This resulted in the SDKs getting loaded when you ran ANY knife command. For example running knife node list would load the Azure SDK, vmware sdk, and rvbmomi for vmware. Obviously this is pretty slow and not something we want to do. I’ve pushed up new versions of these plugins and the results so far are pretty amazing. On my Mac knife commands went from 12 seconds to just over a second and on my Windows system they went from 2 minutes to 9 seconds. I’m waiting on a build right now, which hopefully lowers that number a bit more. If you’d like to give this a try then grab the current build of Chef Workstation here: [https://downloads.chef.io/chef-workstation/current](https://downloads.chef.io/chef-workstation/current)

we especially need folks to test using knife-google, knife-azure, and knife-vcenter to make sure we didn’t break any dependency loading.

**Sous Chefs**

Xorima shared

_Tim got bored this week and released a few things:_

_gpg 1.0.1 released_  
[_https://supermarket.chef.io/cookbooks/gpg#changelog_](https://supermarket.chef.io/cookbooks/gpg#changelog)  
_selinux\_policy 2.3.6 released_  
[_https://supermarket.chef.io/cookbooks/selinux\_policy#changelog_](https://supermarket.chef.io/cookbooks/selinux_policy#changelog)  
_consul 3.2.0 released_  
[_https://supermarket.chef.io/cookbooks/consul#changelog_](https://supermarket.chef.io/cookbooks/consul#changelog)  
_control\_groups 0.2.0 released_  
[_https://supermarket.chef.io/cookbooks/control\_groups_](https://supermarket.chef.io/cookbooks/control_groups)  
_fail2ban 6.2.0 released_  
[_https://supermarket.chef.io/cookbooks/fail2ban#changelog_](https://supermarket.chef.io/cookbooks/fail2ban#changelog)  
_hashicorp-vault 4.0 released_  
[_https://supermarket.chef.io/cookbooks/hashicorp-vault#changelog_](https://supermarket.chef.io/cookbooks/hashicorp-vault#changelog)  
_consul 3.3.0 released_  
[_https://supermarket.chef.io/cookbooks/consul#changelog_](https://supermarket.chef.io/cookbooks/consul#changelog)

_We are starting to look into managing our dns with cloudflare and work continues in the background on our release pipeline which we will hopefully have something to demo in a couple of weeks._

_Join us in_ [_#sous-chefs_](https://chefcommunity.slack.com/archives/C2V7B88SF) _for our meeting_

**Other updates**

BobChaos shared

_On Cinc side, We've got releases for Client 15.7.32 (stable channel) and Auditor 4.18.66 (unstable channel). We've put more work into_ [_Cinc.sh_](http://Cinc.sh) _, including a new blog post and some under-the-hood improvements._

_We're also in the process of reworking the pipelines to integrate cinc-zero and Auditor into Client, which will hopefully result in a methodology we can later apply to Workstation. The bootstrap issues we have on 3rd party distros are being actively worked on, we can expect a PR by next week._

_Finally, a big thanks to the workstation team who's worked on the go dist-generator, now merged, which will allow distros to easily generate a compliant build of all Chef's Golang project, using a standardized methodology._

ramereth shared

_I'm excited about this refactor on how we patch Cinc as it should simplify things quite a bit. If you want a preview of what we're working on you can check it out here:_ [_https://gitlab.com/cinc-project/client/-/merge\_requests/28_](https://gitlab.com/cinc-project/client/-/merge_requests/28)

_This should allow us to match versions locked and then use our patches no matter which version. Also catch any issues since the git merges should fail if that's the case_

## **See you next week!**

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**Author:** ![bennyvasquez](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.chef.io/bennyvasquez/32/2559_2.png) [@bennyvasquez](https://discourse.chef.io/u/bennyvasquez)\
**Post date:** [February 29, 2020, 6:38pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/meeting-notes-for-jan-30-2020/16604/2 "2020-02-29T18:38:55Z")

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