hint: you do Friday, June 21, 13 ---who cares where we keep our packages? I give you a hint: you do, because 6 months of not caring and you will have a guaranteed hot mess on your hands. I kept thinking that I should care more about software storage on my first project, but I was so busy with Chef, that I never took the time to create a system that was easy to use for anyone. This means that everyone else using chef just did what they needed at that moment to cope. In the days before we had the omnibus installer, we needed Ruby, Rubygems and access to rubygems.org because that’s where gems come from. RH 5 shipped with ruby 1.8.5, pretty much unusable with Chef RH 6 ships with ruby 1.8.7 which is less traumatic today because we have Omnibus. But if you want one single other thing that isn’t Chef, you still need all these things. what do you do when your servers can’t access the internet? If you’re dumb like us, you download ruby source and rubygems tarball and install them from scratch on every server you build. I worked with a colleague last year to eliminate the Ruby compile from source on our VM builds and decreased build time by 5 minutes. If you’re smart, you create a central internal “extras” repository and use FPM to create precompiled packages accessible to your OS package manager This not only speeds up build time, but it also makes it REALLY OBVIOUS to anyone with a brain that these things are available to them. So this then also avoids people getting new binaries and dropping them all over