Scaling Chef Emotionally at Slack - Lessons from Hypergrowth

Explore the journey of scaling Chef at Slack in this 33-minute conference talk from SREcon23 Europe/Middle East/Africa. Discover how Brett Pemberton and the Slack team navigated periods of hypergrowth, from initial launch through pandemic times, while managing their Chef infrastructure. Learn about the challenges faced in scaling Chef to accommodate an increasing number of engineers, the emotions experienced during this process, and the decisions made to create a culture of safe deployments while allowing for experimentation. Gain insights into maintaining a flexible and scalable Chef codebase, balancing the needs of the infrastructure team and individual engineers, and the lessons learned along the way.