[chef] Re: Re: What kind of load can Chef Server support?

[Alex Howells < >]

On 28 January 2012 16:13, Bryan McLellan 
<
 >
 wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 9:27 PM,  
> <
 >
>  wrote:
>> I guess my question is, if we were to flick the switch on a rollout to 200
>> nodes at the sametime, would Chef server cope with that level of
>> concurrency? If we have our nodes running as daemons, we can stagger 
>> deploys
>> with a splay time I guess.

[snip]

> Until you get pretty big, scaling the Chef server is easy if you're
> familiar with scaling services in general. There is, as we say, no
> magical unicorn. You still need system administrators. You still have
> to do the work. If you hit a real wall then Opscode can help, we've
> already hit it. :)

As noted the complexity of your recipes directly impacts the number of
clients which you can host on your setup.

Beyond that then 'number of convergences per hour' becomes the useful
measure, and remember, relaxing the interval works for *many* people
and directly translates to significantly reduced load.

With a reasonably powerful system and a little tuning, getting to
5000+ convergences an hour should be trivial.  If you split-out the
components to put CouchDB and Solr onto dedicated hardware and then
run multiple API nodes behind a load balancer, then you can achieve
significantly more, but it is more of an investment to get this spun
up.