There's a reason Heroku is so popular. As developers we often prefer to focus on coding (and sometimes providing business value) over setting up and maintaining servers and infrastructure.Setting up a full stack with e.g. apache/nginx, containers/wrappers, permissions, monitoring, alerts etc. can be a daunting task if you have not experienced it before. Even more terrifying is the thought of having to do it all again (from memory, or some patchy notes) if the server crashes or you need to scale out horizontally. Tools such as Chef and Puppet allow you to document and execute the setup and maintenance of your servers with code. From a developer's perspective I'll show you how "easily" you can setup your own servers with Chef. I'll also share with you my experiences from using Chef for more than a year now. There are some nice tools like Librarian-Chef which helps you keep your Chef-repository cleaner and more organised. Finally I'll talk a bit about when you should reuse cookbooks/recipes from the community and when you should create your own.