Announcing Kitchen

[Miquel Torres]

Hi chefs!

Today I'd like to announce a new project.

When using a push based Configuration Management System such as the LittleChef / Chef Solo combo, you don't automatically have a view of your nodes accessible through a web interface, as you do with a Chef Server. And even if you have a Chef Server, the interface isn't made for infrastructure discovery: it sometimes feels like a Chef reporting tool. Once you grow past a couple of dozen servers which have different dependencies between them, a dashboard to browse nodes becomes very useful.

That is exactly what Aengus, Dario and I built at edelight, starting on two different Hackdays, and finishing it off as time allowed.

Behold, Kitchen! github.com/edelight/kitchen

It uses your LittleChef kitchen repository to produce a Dashboard with 3 views: List, Virt (optional) and Graph. And it is awesome.
We also published a cookbook to deploy it: github.com/edelight/chef-kitchen

We hope to add in the near future a Chef Server and/or a Hosted Chef backend, at which point we will also announce it on the Chef mailing list.

So give it a go and tell us what you think!