There are two sides to every software and IT story: the story of the people doing the work, and the stories the vendors will tell you about how that work can be done more efficiently. Sometimes, the hardest part of the job can be reconciling these two often disparate views of the world, as vision means pavement, and tools meet unique problems. That's why it's so important to discuss the usage of IT tooling with real IT practitioners. Today, we've got two very smart IT folks packed into this episode of the Maker's Podcast, both here to discuss the usage of Chef in enterprise environments.

First up is Stephen Figgins, Associate Director of Operations for Agile Technology Solutions at the University of Kansas. "We have been working with Chef for six years and have had a lot of success. Our Chef made it very easy for us to move to AWS. AWS had a lot of complexity to it, like learning how to setup security and networks and things like that. One thing we really didn't have to worry about in this was how do we configure the EC2 nodes we're going to create. Because we already knew how to take a blank EC2 node and make it run our application. We were able to not focus instead on lifting and shifting our applications from our non-cloud environment and instead focus on how we could best leverage the cloud," said Figgins.

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYpTuheMXE8