[chef] Re: Re: Re: Feelings on chef

[Mike Bailey < >]

On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 11:22 PM, Marcus Bointon < "> > wrote:

On 4 May 2010, at 14:59, Lee Azzarello wrote:

> 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.

I meant that sufficient performance to support say, 100 nodes, could probably be achieved using flat text files. 

I'm still excited about the Chef project but after spending more time with it I'm a little concerned about the complexity of chef as a configuration management system.

I currently generate my configuration files using scripts/templates and keep them in git. It's pretty simple. Even if my git server goes away I can restore from a backup. It's just text.

Requiring a Chef server to be running in order to configure a server seems to add more dependencies. I'm not familiar with CouchDB so if that was hosed I'm concerned about being unable to configure hosts until I'd debugged it. Adding an AMQP server and solr indexer to the required services also seems to add more possible points of failure.

(chef-solo seems to remove a lot of complexity from the system)

The idea of Chef updating my HAProxy config when I fire up a new app server is exciting! I just wonder whether I really need it? Keeping node data under version control would probably allow me to sleep better at night.

I'm enjoying the discussion. :-)

- Mike