A lot of the service the Radiant Machine will provide is related to infrastructure—setting up a site, configuring the server, adding monitoring, etc. Like it or not, this is an area that I’m not all that savvy with, nor do I like tinkering with it. I usually just set up the bare minimum and call it done. Luckily, there are plenty of sysadmin experts out there, and one such group of them has produced a great open-source product: Chef.

Like Puppet, Chef is a systems configuration management tool. However, unlike Puppet, Chef “recipes” are in pure Ruby and the codebase is MUCH smaller and easier to understand. This makes it much easier to get into from a programmer’s perspective—you just need to know Ruby. Furthermore, Ezra Zygmuntowicz posted a nice tutorial on how to get started with chef-solo, the miniature version that doesn’t require all the setup. Ezra and his team are using Chef in their newest product, EY Solo, and I’ve heard that 37signals is looking to add Chef into their sysadmin workflow as well.

As a result of my tinkering with Chef, I’ve already contributed a couple patches. I hope to increase my participation in the future as I work out more of the Radiant Machine setup.

Stay tuned to this blog for updates – big things are coming soon!