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

[Michael Hale < >]

I too felt that chef-server was overly complex for single server
setups so I hacked together drive-thru:
http://github.com/mikehale/drive-thru. It needs to be be re-written to
use capistrano, but I think it is a decent example of going from an
ssh connection to being able to configure a box using version
controlled scripts.

On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 10:22 AM, Haselwanter Edmund
<
 >
 wrote:
>
> On 04.05.2010, at 16:16, Mike Bailey wrote:
>
>
> 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. :-)
>
> why not start out with using chef-solo?
> http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Chef+Solo
> http://brainspl.at/articles/2009/01/31/cooking-with-chef-101
> http://akitaonrails.com/2010/02/20/cooking-solo-with-chef
> That's chef without chef server
> put all your stuff in a git repo (roles, config-json, cookbooks). use your
> favorite transport workflow (manually copy it over with ftp or scp, use
> capistrano) and start
> a chef-solo run. you loose the query interface of chef-server but maybe you
> don't need it.
>
> - Mike
>
> --
> DI Edmund Haselwanter, 
> 
 ,
> http://edmund.haselwanter.com/
>
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