[chef] Re: Re: Re: Re: should I be using chef?

[Brad Knowles < >]

On Dec 27, 2011, at 9:31 AM, Jake Vanderdray wrote:

>  How do you mange your validator PEM?  Do you end up doing the
> initial install for the developers and put the PEM on manually, or do
> you openly share the validator within your organization?

That's shared openly by all systems and users in the company.  Of course, 
we're a small shop -- seven people at the moment, although I understand that 
they're looking to fill some positions.  And of those, not all are 
developers.  Of the developers we have, most aren't doing much of anything at 
all with Chef -- as the Ops guy, I'm the primary one doing most of the work 
with Chef.

Pretty much all of our systems are (or will be) VMs "in the cloud".  Our 
developers do have local machines that they work from, but those are 
primarily used as a place to jump off into the actual development work that 
is done elsewhere.

To be honest, if you're using a Chef-managed environment, I don't see how you 
can avoid sharing the validator PEM amongst all systems.  For those people 
who are developers but who don't need root access to their development 
machines, I could see where they wouldn't have open access to the validator 
PEM, but everyone doing anything with Chef would need to have access.

>  We're testing out using Vagrant instances for developers that get
> built with our normal chef cookbooks.  I'd love to just be able to
> point people at a wiki page of instructions and let it be self-serve.

We could use vagrant, but we really want to get away from having any physical 
hardware that we have to manage, beyond the desktops that each person sits in 
front of -- and they're mostly responsible for managing those machines.

We do have a server with a few VMs loaded on it, and that machine has been 
used for some development to date, but going forward I think we're going to 
get away from that.


Of course, in a larger shop, I could see where our flat development 
architecture wouldn't necessarily work so well.

-- 
Brad Knowles 
<
 >
SAGE Level IV, Chef Level 0.0.1