[chef] Re: Feelings on chef

[Adam Jacob < >]

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

I'm not going to turn this into a list where we do lots of sales, but
one of the things we do for a living is run Chef for you as a service.
 We're happy to hook you up with an account on the Opscode Platform,
at which point you don't have to worry about any of this. :)

> 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?

Having node configuration in flat files is a TIMTOWTDI thing.  In my
experience, I wanted the infrastructure to be more dynamic than that -
in particular, I wanted new nodes to be able to show up essentially
fully configured from the bootstrapping system.  The side-effect is
that I never wanted to have to create a file on disk describing each
of the systems.  I totally get the pattern, though, and the hooks are
there to support it in things like 'knife node from file'.

> 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.

Clearly we have a documentation gap, and likely a place for a "chef
server lite".

Adam

-- 
Opscode, Inc.
Adam Jacob, CTO
T: (206) 508-7449 E: