[chef] Re: Re: Using Chef to add new Nodes to an nginx LB

[Ranjib Dey < >]

hi,

As Brad has already mentioned you can use search to get the list of webservers , but this has to be part of the nginx recipe, which means there will be a delay. Every time  you add or remove a webserver u need to wait till the nginx chef client runs. You can automate this via invoking chef-client --once , through knife ssh, as a after hook to webserver creation/deletion. Also, you can use something like mcollective to model the exact scenario.

regards

ranjib

On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 9:13 AM, Brad Knowles < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

On Jan 23, 2012, at 9:06 PM, zuhaib siddique wrote:

> So for a while now we have been using Amazon ELB as our LB for our server and we have an internal cookbook that adds new nodes to a particular ELB using fog.  Well now it seems due to some requirement changes we might need to move away from ELB to nginx.  Now one of the things that is bugging me is a dynaimc way of adding new nodes to nginx.  I have in the past setup simple round robin load balancers with nginx but we would like an way to make sure everytime we deploy a server its automatically added to the nginx LB and before I go out and reinvent the wheel I am wondering if anyone else has done this or at lest has something that can point me in the right directions so I can write my own.

We built a simple search-based method for use with haproxy.  Every time that chef-client executes on the proxy server(s), it does a search of all nodes that have a certain role (e.g., "role[web]"), and all the nodes that come back as matching that search get put into the set of machines to be load balanced.

We're now switching away from haproxy, and we've looked at both nginx and lighttpd for this function.  Both look useful, but since we're also switching away from apache/httpd to lighttpd for web serving, we're going to try going with lighttpd as the reverse proxy as well.  That way we can kill two birds with one stone, and remove one package from our list of dependencies that we may not really need.

But we'll still use the search-based method of updating our load-balancing rules, at least until we find a better solution.

--
Brad Knowles < " target="_blank"> >
SAGE Level IV, Chef Level 0.0.1