DevOps is the new rage among system administrators, applying agile software development techniques to infrastructure configuration management. In the center of the DevOps movement is the open-source Chef tool, implemented in Ruby atop CouchDB. Unsatisfied with the performance of the open-source and/or hosted Chef server and needing better integration with our Python web application, we set out to build a new implementation in Python atop MongoDB. This talk will give you an overview of Chef, reasons for doing a new implementation, and lots of code examples of how we made it all work together to get a chef server that screams.