[chef] Re: Feelings on chef

[Lee Azzarello < >]

As someone who has an installation with more than 10 nodes and a full
chef-server, it scales pretty good so the complexity paid off. The
cool part about the chef server and client is they communicate using a
REST interface that is well documented. This means a new server
implementation that isn't built to scale to a large network of nodes
is possible with an existing light weight web application framework
like Sinatra.

-lee

On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 7:59 AM, Marcus Bointon
<
 >
 wrote:
> 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/
>
>
>



-- 
_______________
Lee Azzarello
drop.io staff hacker