Re: Evalutating Chef for ec2 management

[Michael Hale <mikehale@gmail.com>]

Hi Chris. Welcome to the list.

On Sat, Mar 28, 2009 at 5:10 PM, snacktime <snacktime@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm brand new to chef and looking at it as a possible solution for
> configuring ec2 instances.  The project I am working on is a job scheduler
> that uses ec2 nodes.  It's designed to start up and configure ec2 nodes,
> then hand out jobs to the running instances, monitor them, start/stop new
> servers based on various conditions, etc..  Similar to the Condor scheduler
> but all in ruby/rails.
>
> One of the main goals is to be able to use any ami, which means the system
> has to be able to configure a new instance from the ground up when it
> boots.  So far I've been designing around using Capistrano + custom tasks.
> Creating a bunch of rake tasks works fine, but something like Chef could
> help standardize things more.   Would Chef solo be a good fit here?  Could I
> push out recipes to a new instance with capistrano and run them without
> having to use a Chef server?

Chef-solo will work fine in this situation. You could even pass a url
to chef-solo instead of having to push the recipes to the ami before
running chef-solo.

If you need something to install chef-solo on the ami I wrote a
sprinkle script that uses ssh to install chef:
http://github.com/mikehale/sprinkle_chef/

>
> Chris
>
>
>



-- 
Michael Hale
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