[chef] Chef Server

[Tim Uckun < >]

Hey guys.

As you may have guessed I am a noob  trying to get chef up and going
for my infrastructure. I have some puppet experience but I wanted a
more "just ruby" type of system so I am giving chef a go.  I also used
automateit briefly and liked it quite a bit but it's abandoned so I
decided against it.

I just wanted to relay some thought from a beginner in hope that this
can give some insight into what the experience is like for a person
starting out. I hope you don't take any of this as criticism, just
some musings that I hope might trigger discussion.

I tried making things work just chef solo for about a week but I think
I have come to the conclusion that I need a chef server.  A lot of the
recipes presume a server and some things don't work with out it.

There are so many moving parts in chef that it's kind of mind
boggling.  Runit, solr, rabbitmq, merb (merb!!??), couchdb, chef,
ohai, knife, and other addons like knife-solo (which needs python),
librarian etc.  I am sure there is a good reason for all this but it's
a bit intimidating to have to manage and learn all of these things.

The bootstrap commands seem to ignore the fact you may have rubygems
already installed and want to download one anyway. I wasn't expecting
that and ended up writing my own bootstrap script.

Knife, chef-client, chef-solo all need different config files and some
items are repeated. I would prefer just one config file with all the
options in it.

It would be nice if I could define my nodes in ruby like I define all
my recipes and roles. Same goes for databags.  I also prefer yaml to
json but that's just me.

The wiki is pretty nice, thanks to whoever is maintaining that.

You guys have been most helpful on the mailing list. Thanks for your patience.