[chef] Can I use Chef to...manage customer accounts and databases too?

[Kris Read < >]

Hi!  I'm new to Chef having heard about it for the first time at OSCON this year.

We love the idea of using Chef to manage our Amazon EC2 servers.  We are constantly trying to manage these with bash scripts right now, and we are making new images all the time when our old ones get outdated.  Chef seems to be the best possible solution here. 

We have another problem though.  We manage databases for our clients and so we have hundreds of clients and each has their own database.  We need to continually be adding, removing, cloning, enabling, disabling databases and database users.   Chef seems to be very oriented to managing SERVERS but could we write something to have it also manage our databases ON the servers? 

Lastly we want to do this from a web interface so we can start having non-devops people like our customer support staff do some of this through the web.  Does Chef Server have a web interface that we could extend with tasks like managing customer accounts or databases too?

Please let me know. 

-K. Read