Chef is an open source systems integration framework built to bring the benefits of configuration management to your entire infrastructure. You write source code to describe how you want each part of your infrastructure to be built, then apply those descriptions to your servers. The result is a fully automated infrastructure: when a new server comes on line, the only thing you have to do is tell Chef what role it should play in your architecture. Chef is more than a configuration management tool though, it is also a powerful systems integration platform. Your application servers can find data base servers and create connection information on the fly. Your load balancers can dynamically add new resources to the pool as they become available.

This session will focus on leveraging Chef to provision and deploy highly available Django application stacks. Developed by Opscode and a vibrant open source community, Chef is being used to automate and deploy large-scale infrastructures all over the world. Chef is freely available under the Apache 2.0 license so that anyone can run it, build on it, or submit changes back to the project.