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

[Adam Jacob < >]

Hi!

You can do a couple of things here.  We support Data Bags for storing
arbitrary data - so you can model things as having a "database" data
bag, which has an item for each database, with instructions on how it
should be configured.  Then have your recipes read that data, and do
the right thing.  Same goes for users, or anything else you need to
provision.

As for having a nice Web UI, you have two choices.  The Chef Server
and the Opscode Platform both ship with Web UI's that are generic, but
can be used for basic editing.  If you have a specific application in
mind, just use the API to write to the data bags directly - it's just
RESTful GET/PUT/POST/DELETE with some authentication wrapped around
it.  We have a number of people who have examples of doing just that
for things like user management.

Best,
Adam

On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 4:08 PM, Kris Read 
<
 >
 wrote:
> 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 making new images all the time when our old ones get outdated.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
>



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