[chef] Re: Using Chef to Configue Autoscaled EC2 Instances

[John Martinez < >]

Hello,

I agree with you, using knife to provision EC2 instances is not the best way 
to do this in autoscaled environments. As a temporary solution, I've done 
exactly what you suggest. I pass along a lot of things into user-data, and 
specifically, a node's role is one of those. I read user-data and tell Chef 
on the node what its role is (amongst other things). It's a kludge. I'm going 
to be looking into integrating Chef with CloudFormation, which plays nice(r) 
with ASGs.

http://aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/aws-cloudformation-articles-and-tutorials/
 (second link)
https://s3.amazonaws.com/cloudformation-examples/IntegratingAWSCloudFormationWithOpscodeChef.pdf

-john

On Nov 10, 2011, at 9:44 AM, 
<
 >
 
<
 >
 wrote:

> Hi all, I'd like to get some feedback on how people are doing this now. It
> seems that since .10, the preferred way of starting Amazon EC2 instances is 
> via
> the 'knife ec2 server create' command, while the 'knife ec2 instance data' 
> and
> chef preinstalled AMIs are deprecated. That's all fine and good for manually
> launching instances, but what about autoscaling? When a node comes up for
> autoscalling, I want it to update and configure itself according to its 
> role(s)
> and environment. With the instance data method of doing thing deprecated,
> what's the alternative (aside from having a custom baked AMI that I need to
> manually update as is the normal way of doing this without chef)? If there 
> is
> no alternative, and I have to use the deprecated method which would mean 
> using
> 'knife ec2 instance data' to wire into the autoscaling group as UserData. 
> When
> using this method how would I specify the environment that the server 
> should be
> run as too? I don't see anyway to do this using the instance data. Running 
> some
> command outside the server after the server it is started to set the
> environment is not an option as we won't know when a new server has been 
> spun
> up (controlled by Amazon). 
> 
> I'm interested in what other people have found to be best practice for this
> scenario and any advice, tips or tricks that have been learned while trying 
> to
> work with chef and autoscaled EC2 instances. 
> 
> Thanks for your thoughts!