Over the last 20+ years my personal blogging has been marred with fits and starts. The services/platforms/tools that I have used to host my words are countless – I literally can't name them all – but I had thought that I found a platform in Mediumwith a balance of style, customization and best of all dead simple tooling. All of that changed about a year ago when, like many other Internet businesses, their model for revenue changed and I was constantly begged to pay money to read other people's thoughts.
At Bloomberg my team is tasked with supporting infrastructure for all of our consumer and subscription web properties. We have been using Chef to solve some of our problems around configuration management. Most of our recipes were built using Chef Solo and eventually deployed on our cloud infrastructure without a Chef Server. As we began to plan to deploy software services to the teams that we support we quickly began to realize that it would be nearly impossible to manage multiple node deployments without Chef Server.
In Washington, during the peak of Hurricane Sandy, my power went out. The wind outside was howling, the UPS that my MacBook was connected to began to scream, and my Comcast Internet was hosed. We were in the middle of manually failing over our application servers to our New Jersey datacenter, and now I had to continue on my T-mobile tethered cellphone.