[chef] Re: Re: Re: Re: Chef on Amazon EC2 with auto-scaling

[Edward Sargisson < >]

Hi,
Please forgive me for directing you to my own blog but here is my post
on how I did it [1] (which Opscode kindly link to). This method
(provided to me on this list) uses Ubuntu's cloud-init to bootstrap
Chef onto the image and then gets Chef to do the rest.

Re: OS upgrades. If you mean package upgrades then write a cookbook
that does it. There is an apt cookbook for ubuntu that updates the
package list but doesn't run the upgrade for you.

If you want to actually upgrade the OS (i.e. Ubuntu Maverick to Natty)
then Chef doesn't do this directly. In EC2 these images are pre-baked
so, with Chef, instead of starting with the Maverick image you start
with the Natty image. Chef will then install everything else you need
and you just need to test to make sure it worked..

[1] 
http://www.trailhunger.com/blog/technical/2011/05/28/keeping-an-amazon-elastic-compute-cloud-ec2-instance-up-with-chef-and-auto-scaling/

On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 5:16 AM, Bryan McLellan 
<
 >
 wrote:
>
> On Jul 18, 2011 6:32 AM, "Oliver Beattie" 
> <
 >
>  wrote:
>> * As I originally mentioned, what is the procedure for managing these
>> servers? Would I just be able to run commands via knife to all my servers?
>> How does it keep track of nodes joining (or more importantly leaving) my
>> "cluster"?
>
> Knife uses the Chef server API to talk to the server. Since all nodes
> register with the server (both a node object for the data and a client
> object for authentication) knife node list produces a list of all nodes
> registered with the server. Knife doesn't know about nodes itself. When you
> use knife to create a new system, via ec2 server create or bootstrap, the
> node still registers itself with the chef server, not knife.
>
>> * Another (somewhat unrelated question) I had is how does Chef manage OS
>> upgrades? Does it manage them at all? For instance, how would I say "go run
>> aptitude upgrade on all my production servers"?
>
> knife ssh name:* "sudo aptitude upgrade -y"
>
> Or you can create a cookbook to do this if you trust upstream to produce
> non-breaking changes.
>
> Chef itself doesn't manage OS upgrades, but it certainly can.Remember that
> Chef is a tool designed to help you automate your systems. A hammer doesn't
> pound nails alone.
>
> Bryan
>