Meeting notes for Sept 29th, 2022

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

Kiah shared

Hi lovely people! Thanks for joining me for another community meeting.

Here are a few updates for your educational reading pleasure:

Blog posts to check out:
Making use of InSpec Azure Cloud Resource
ChefConf ‘22 Recap: Product Announcements & Key Takeaways
Making use of InSpec AWS Cloud Resource
Chef Cloud Security with AWS

As promised here is the recording of the inaugural Community Advisory Council Meeting:
Day 1- password: y&29qa2w
Day 2- password: T..YY@19

Don’t forget, the next meeting is on October 13th directly after the Community Meeting

On to releases:

No releases today but we do have an important update from the Chef Client team

Chef Client UpdateThe Chef Infra Client 18 Release Candidate (RC) is now available for community evaluation. We had announced in May this year that we were seeking feedback from the community on our release cadence. We also mentioned we were going to experiment with releasing an RC. The RC for Chef Infra Client 18 is now available.

Please feel free to reach out to @George Westwater, @Sudharshan Kaushikk, or post questions/feedback in #chef-infra-client-18 or #chef-infra-dev This release does not include all operating systems. We are still working on the testing and dependency resolution issues for AIX, Solaris, and Windows 2012.

What does this mean to you…We know many PRs have been paused while we addressed this difficult testing and build validation cycle. We are almost ready to open that back up again. Why almost?? After some internal discussion and debate, we believe moving to a GA release without the support of AIX, Solaris, and Windows 2012 would be problematic for many users. We would like to put all our focus on finishing those three operating systems, then release Chef 18.0. Following that, we will process the PR backlog.

We hope we can start processing that backlog within the next few weeks. However, as many of you know who join us for the weekly PR reviews, the Ruby 3.1 upgrade has caused validation challenges for us on some select operating systems. If you are a Solaris, AIX, or Windows 2012 wizard and would like to help or are available for questions, please let us know in the #chef-infra-dev channel.

As usual folks, this is an open forum. Feel free to start a discourse with the teams in a thread.

This week’s releases

No releases this week

Updates

Chef Leadership

George Westwater shared

Thank you @Kiah and apologies for today’s update being fairly wordy/denseAs you read/saw earlier in this meeting, the Chef 18 RC.0 (18.0.155) is ready for preview. This represents the culmination of a huge amount of effort from the Chef Client team and those of you who have helped along the way.Thank you for all your help, input, and patience through this release process. Although we are not yet at a GA release. This does represent a large milestone in us getting to that point. After discussing it with the team, I made the call to delay consuming the PRs until we can finish the build validation for AIX, Solaris, and Windows 2012.

Please feel free to reach out if you have thoughts or concerns about that decision.I know the PR backlog is a huge problem, and many people are waiting for fixes, enhancements, and other items in those PRs, and this decision to delay that for a “few” weeks” may be a disappointment. The reason I am moving to delay the PR acceptance for a short bit of time is to limit the number of variables the team is working with. This is to prevent the situation where one of the PRs causes a failure on the full regression suite forcing us to restart the certification process on all operating systems. It is my hope that this will ensure we can swarm the issue and get us unblocked as fast as possible.

Once the validation suites pass for these three operating systems, we will begin the process of merging the PRs. We expect this process to go smoothly; however, just in case it does not, we will approach this round of PR merges with a bit more rigor.

Immediately following “clearing the PR backlog,” the team will branch out and work in parallel to backport specific PRs and start the validation process on older Chef Client releases.I mentioned we would be processing the Chef 18 PRs with a bit more rigor; what I mean by that is we be consuming and validating PRs with a temporary process that is intended to ensure we can get as many merged as fast as possible. The tentative plan (VERY EARLY DRAFT) of the action plan is below. The goal of this plan is to ensure that we could (if we choose to) rapidly cut a Chef 18.1 release at the end of any PR merger.-- Draft Plan --Dependency Update
1/ The team will spin up a new branch and pull ALL gem updates.
2/ Run the validation pipeline against that change
3/ If the validation fails, the team will evaluate the time to fix or delay the gem updates.PR Merge (For each PR)
1/ Do a quick review of the PR
2/ Run the validation pipeline against that change
3/ If the validation fails, the team will stop the PR process and evaluate the time to fix the issue/rollback/abort etc.

The intent is this will allow us to stop, abort or change direction on any PR to allow us to merge the most PRs without any delay. If you have a better method for us to limit the variables and process the PRs faster while still running the full regression suite, please message me (@George Westwater) or open a dialog in the #chef-infra-dev channel.

A quick note on the future release cadence discussion. I am pulling together a new summary of our thoughts based on all the feedback and learnings through the Chef 18 RC cycle. You have been heard we need to move faster. We will be working through changes in technology and processes that will allow us to provide minor and patch versions faster without sacrificing quality and testing. To do that, we will be investing in changes to improve our build and validation processes/automation/pipelines. We do expect these changes to have a short-term impact on the releasing cadence. We will be doing as much in parallel as possible, and the Chef Client team will be focused on Chef 18, the PR backlog, and backporting relevant PRs.

In addition to changes to the release process, we will be working on changes to the Chef Client upgrade process to make it easier for you to consume changes faster and more reliably.I would like to end this with a thank you and a request.

First, thank you…

  • For being a part of our community
  • For being there to help and educate me over the last few months
  • For your patience and understanding through this long Chef 18 release process

Last, I do not want to do this in a vacuum… So I need your help as we invest in improving our processes, automation, builds, validation, and testing process. We will be seeing your assistance, gathering requirements, and looking for feedback on all technical aspects of the process. We will be working with @Jeff Strauss and @Kiah to set up a regular review of changes. I know not everyone will be able to participate in the zoom meetings, but we will move forward with our best effort to be inclusive and have both live and async conversations.

Chef Automate

Kallol Roy shared

Highlights of this week include:

  • Dev work done to support Node name search with “.” in Infrastructure tab
  • Improved Automate documentation to document possible characters in password for Postgres and OpenSearch.
  • Added Automate HA documentation for Data Recovery setup
  • Added Automate HA documentation to add and replace nodes from existing active HA cluster
  • Improved Automate documentation related to resolvers for AWS deployment
  • Supporting Infra Client Report ingestion with empty keys
  • Improved documentation for setting access controls for S3 backup.
  • Automation of backup configuration for file system and object store backup in Automate HA

Chef Habitat

mwrockx shared

Hello from Habitat!
This week we have been working on:

  • Planning releases for builder and habitat with native package functionality
  • Ironing out Node Management APIs
  • Working on ARM bootstrapping
  • Updating file notification and protobuf dependencies

Chef Infra Server

Lincoln Baker shared

Hello from Chef Server

  • Replacing AWS sigv2 with sigv4.
  • Improving information returned in gather-logs command.
  • Design/implement Adhoc scheduling subsystem setup.
  • Investigating build pipeline failures due to removed xenial distribution.
  • Investigating chef_fixie scripts not working in support box.
  • Updating knife-ec-backup to output meaningful success/failure results.

Chef Inspec

cwolfe shared

Not a lot. We're mainly working on an internal project.
Chef InSpec Team:

  • Identified locations in code for Feature callouts
  • Work on implementing a Text User Interface engine

Chef Workstation

Vikram Karve shared

Hi All! Here is what Workstation, Community Tools & Omnibus folks are working on

Workstation

  • The cookbook upload feature is almost ready for merge in the upcoming GUI app.
  • Few code changes being done in the UI layer here to support search listed cookbooks.
  • Addressing a packaging issue on macOS introduced with the newly added Ruby-on-Rails service.

Omnibus

  • Regular updates to omnibus-software versions are ongoing.
  • Preparing to introduce some diagrams and basic dev-docs in omnibus.
  • Setting up an omnibus project to build universal macOS package for infra client.

Sous Chefs

ramereth shared

Hello from Sous Chefs!

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

  • pyenv - 4.2.0: Add support for ubuntu >= 22.04 and debian >= 11

  • rsyslog - 9.2.0: Allow omitting $MaxMessageSize from config

  • selinux - 6.0.6

  • Add missing policycoreutils-python package

  • Include additional platforms and suites for testing

  • Run apt_update in selinux_install on Debian-based systems, Fix SELinux enablement on Ubuntu 18.04

  • cinc-omnibus: repository created, initial cookbook PR should be up soon

  • Various updates with our repository terraform to resolve issues with github

Cinc Updates

ramereth shared

Hello from the Cinc Project!

  • cinc-omnibus cookbook

  • Have most of this cookbook done and have replaced/updated what we used in the original omnibus cookbook

  • Targeting Linux initially, with plans to add support for Windows and MacOS builders

  • Will be using this to build new omnibus docker images

  • Start working on a Cinc Client 18 RC build and work out any build issues we may run into

See you next week!

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