Meeting notes for July 8th, 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’ve got a few things to share before we talk about releases.

This week’s releases

Chef Automate

benny Vasquez shared

A MASSIVE Automate 2 update was released, as we continue to improve things both in the front-end and the back-end there. There are some major bugs getting addressed, and updated compliance profiles, the UI around managing servers, and much, much more. Automate 2 version 20210629161835 Released!

Chef Habitat

benny Vasquez shared

and just yesterday, Habitat got a release, too! Chef Habitat 1.6.351 Released! We’re still working on a core-plans refresh there that seems like it’s currently targeted for early August, so keep your eyes open there.

Chef Inspec

benny Vasquez shared

We released version 4.38.3 of Chef InSpec with a new mongodb_conf resource and some important bug fixes. Release notes here: Chef InSpec 4.38.3 Released!

Chef Workstation

benny Vasquez shared

We also (finally) got a workstation release with significant improvements to policyfiles, new improved defaults in Test Kitchen, and the first InSpec rules in Cookstyle, and a fix for the bug that was causing problems for the :souschefs: (which we’ll talk a bit more about in the team update from Nikhil) Chef Workstation 21.7.524 Released!

Other releases

benny Vasquez shared

Test Kitchen 3.0 is out along with updates to most of the plugins to work with 3.0. This new version has updates to the Chef Infra provisioners and the defaults to make getting started with Test Kitchen easier: https://github.com/test-kitchen/test-kitchen/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#300-2021-07-02

A ton of virtual boxes got updates, too:

  • Debian 10.10 amd64/i386 Bento boxes are now up for Test Kitchen testing with Vagrant on virtualbox, parallels, and vmware
  • Updated boxes for Debian / Ubuntu on parallels, virtualbox, and vmware have also been uploaded. The vmware images for Ubuntu 18.04 and 20.04 have also been updated to prevent kernel panics on boot.
  • New vagrant boxes for springdalelinux 7.9 are up now with the addition of parallels and vmware boxes
  • New almalinux Vagrant 8.4 boxes are up and we now have vmware boxes available
  • We also now have rockylinux 8.4 vagrant boxes for virtualbox and vmware. This will be supported out of the box with kitchen-vagrant in the next release
  • Fedora 33 and Oracle Linux 7 boxes have also been updated

Updates

Chef Habitat

mwrockx shared

This week we have been working on:

  • Builder Notifications
  • Core-plans team onboarding
  • Continued work on core-plans refresh
  • Released Habitat 1.6.351 which includes an updated version of powershell (7.1.3) and opts out of powershell telemetry

Chef Infra Client

tas50 shared

The last few weeks have been some rage coding after community slack conversations around pain points in Policyfiles. From these conversations we added a new 'metadata' helper to the Policyfiles to make them simpler to write, updated Test Kitchen to update the Policyfile automatically before converging, added the ability to export Policyfiles with group names, and added the ability to use override run lists with Policyfiles. The chef-cli/Test Kitchen side of things went out with the last Workstation and override run lists will go out next week with 17.3

Work also continues on integrating with secrets managers. We have a MVP of a new secrets helper for the Chef Infra Language merged and ready for 17.3. We've very purposefully kept this basic so we can get feedback on how users want to access secrets including things like caching and saved sets of default config values. Our first use of this new helper for AWS Secrets Manager is about to be merged and that will also ship in 17.3: Experimental support for an AWS Secrets Fetcher by marcparadise · Pull Request #11791 · chef/chef · GitHub

Other misc things going on: Ruby 3.0.2 upgrade with a ton of bundler/rubygems fixes and some nice fixes for powershell_package to let you pass options.

Take a look at the WIP release notes for more details on the resource improvements and how override run lists work with policyfiles: https://github.com/chef/chef/pull/11788/files

and please do keep the policyfiles feedback coming. It's helpful to understand where it's not working for folks since this is the present and future of Chef Infra and we want it to be something everyone can consume

Chef Infra Server

tas50 shared

We're currently prepping our mid-month release of Chef Infra Server 14.6 next week. This release will include an upgrade of Rails 4 to Rails 6 as well as Ruby 2.6 -> 2.7 and the embedded Chef Infra Client 15 -> 16. Stay tuned for this release.

We're also working on the 14.7 release of Chef Infra Server that's scheduled for late July / early August. This release upgrades PostgreSQL 9.3 to 13.3, which includes some very nice performance improvements under load. Since a DB migration is a pretty scary thing for many we're taking the extra time to test test test and benchmark the upgrade process. This one isn't getting released until we're entirely sure it's a safe and easy to upgrade.

We also have some nice misc improvements to the ctl command like updating the very old release of the pg gem we use to prevent conflicts and adding a real maintenance command.

Chef Workstation

Nikhil Gupta shared

Hello From Workstation

This week we have been working on:

  • The below issues are now fixed with the latest workstation release
    • Ruby Panic on Docker Image 21.6.489+
    • Knife command tool is crashing on Ubuntu20.04 with chef workstation 21.6.497
  • Issue with Docker image from 21.4.414+
  • forbidden error from knife supermarket unshare is now misleading
  • Supporting the -c and -d flags functionality for all the chef-cli commands(like gem , env, generate etc )

Regarding the workstation release there we some build issues were happening and some training to get familiar with the release package process.

To avoid this in the future we are planning to get familiar with the release process. This knowledge will help us in the future.

Sous Chefs

ramereth shared

Hello from Sous Chefs!

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

  • apache2 - 8.11.2:
    • Fixed error with delivery where it was expecting string interpolation incorrectly, Fix EL8 welcome page
  • apache2 - 8.12.0:
    • Add variables property to default_site resource
    • Convert test suites basic_site and mod_wsgi to use updated default_site resource
  • certificate - 2.0.0:
    • Sous Chefs Adoption
  • docker - 7.7.2:
    • Fix installed_docker_version method on ppc64le which appends v to the version
  • samba - 2.0.2:
    • Remove delayed_action , action and cookbook settings from the share resource as these are not required
  • users - 7.0.1:
    • Allows a given user to be in a group of the same name, that is already created or explicitly defined in its groups key

Thanks to @damacus and @Xorima , I believe our Github org Terraform migration has been completed.

Cinc Updates

ramereth shared

Hello from the Cinc Project!

Cinc Auditor

  • Released 4.38.3

Cinc Workstation

  • Released 21.7.524 via the unstable channel

See you next week!

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