[chef] Feelings on chef

[Marcus Bointon < >]

I've been investigating chef lately, and it's been a pretty rough ride. The 
main things I've learned:
The overall philosophy is great
Chef's implementation is massively complex - I've found chef harder to set up 
than most of the entire server deployments I would have it do!
Despite chef-server's huge infrastructure, it's not the definitive source of 
configuration - the repo is.
Mixing of ruby and JSON syntax is confusing
It will get much more usable once stable packages are out (though of course 
that depends on chef becoming stable itself)
Deployment of straightforward recipes and roles is easy in general; 
configuration for individual nodes is not.
The part that's most likely to need version control (node configs) doesn't 
live in the repo.
The documentation is good on detail (though suffers from obsolescence as chef 
has changed a lot over time), but lacks a big picture
It doesn't help that ubuntu's vm-builder is fairly broken at present
Chef people on irc are very helpful

I have the feeling that most of chef-server is only really much use if you 
happen to be building a huge infrastructure for hosting chef, exactly as 
opscode is, and for everyone else it's just overly complex.

Not having nodes in the repo and server content being overridden by rake 
tasks seems to render much of the server pointless (especially the web UI); a 
folder in the repo for node config and a minimal rest interface talking 
directly to it (i.e. possibly no database) would probably be sufficient for 
several thousand nodes. Are there any plans for a chef-server-lite?

Overall, after 3 weeks of investigation, I don't seem to be much closer to my 
"10 servers in 10 minutes" ideal, which is really quite disappointing. Now 
I'm wondering if a simpler approach like pacha would be better.

Marcus
-- 
Marcus Bointon
Synchromedia Limited: Creators of http://www.smartmessages.net/
UK resellers of 

 
 CRM solutions

 
 | http://www.synchromedia.co.uk/

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