Author: Dave Eddy - Operations Engineer

Here at Voxer, Chef is our Configuration Management software of choice. We introduced Chef into our infrastructure a little less than a year ago, and now rely on it today to provision our machines with as little manual intervention as possible. Since introducing Chef, we have gone from from 1 barely functioning cookbook on a small set of nodes, to 30 cookbooks on ~200 nodes.

To minimize the operational cost of rolling out Chef, we used Hosted Chef instead of running our own Chef server. This worked great; Hosted Chef scaled with us, had very little downtime, and made it easy to get started working with Chef. However, the more nodes you add to Hosted Chef, the more money you owe at the end of the month. Seeing the email come in with our receipt every month made us consider whether it would be worth it to run our own Chef Server.

Welcome to the Voxer Engineering Blog! We're a little late to the party, but for good reason - we've been heads down dealing with our massive growth and building our talented team. There is definitely a fine group of individuals here at Voxer doing some amazing things, and this blog will share the stuff we've been working on. It's only fair considering we’ve enjoyed so many interesting engineering posts from you guys out there.

So please, stop by often, and hopefully you'll enjoy our posts.

And feel free to contact us if you have any questions. We love to talk shop.