How we migrated from Artifactory to an open-source S3-backed solution with zero downtime and no disruption to internal tooling.

One of the developers for a microservice I scaffolded reached out recently asking what could be done about image build times as they had ballooned to 18 minutes. As this was getting closer to a production launch with dozens of deployments into pre-production environments each day it had become an issue causing longer deployments which slowed both delivery and troubleshooting.

At ChefConf in 2023 I, along with Mendel from my team, demoed the framework I had built using Chef to manage our Jenkins instances using JCAsC.

This gave us a way to do zero downtime updates for multiple Jenkins systems in each of our environments. We discussed how using Chef to ensure state recreated the prodction Jenkins when it crashed, to the point where users using Jenkins at the time hadnt noticed that it was recreated.

The slides for this talk are available on GitHub.

I had the pleasure of giving a talk at ChefConf ‘21 on how I had built out a process to setup local environments for the development teams. This had been a manual process, taking even senior developers days to weeks to set up a new system. As much was changing during this time documentation was not keeping up with the changes.

The talk discusses how we use Chef Infra, Test Kitchen and other tools to script the process to a few lines of code for the developer to run and get the end to end time to 45 minutes.

• Session Recording
• Chef Blog Post

Early on in my Chef usage I was invited to talk about how we had automated our Chef Policy pipeline to be entirely scripted using Jenkins pipelines running in docker containers.

• Youtube Recording
• Demo code - Github Repo