[chef] Re: Re: Re: Cloud Deployments

[John Martinez < >]

We also use CloudFormation with Autoscaler for deploying Hosted Chef managed instances in AWS. The biggest issues are:

• Chef bootstrap, since you can't use any of the knife bootstrap methods to launch instances
• Dealing with the Chef validation key
• Dealing with encrypted data bag secrets

We use a combination of EC2 instance metadata (user-data), custom bootstrap scripts and policy-secured S3 buckets to make this all work.

-john

On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 11:16 AM, Nick Peirson < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

On 23/07/2012 15:16, Torben Knerr wrote:

P.S.: from reading the wiki page it appeared to me as knife-ec2 would
be tied to Chef Server usage. True?
http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Launch+Cloud+Instances+with+Knife


On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 4:12 PM, Torben Knerr< " target="_blank"> >  wrote:

Hey guys,

do you have recommendations for a tool that can spin up new
chef-managed vm instances in AWS and provision them using Chef solo?

My first thought was using the ec2-tools and knife-solo[1], but then I
was looking for a more "integrated" approach. For that mccloud[2] and
vagrant-aws[3] look appealing to me.

Would you recoommend either of them or do you have suggestions for other tools?

Thanks a lot,
Torben


[1] https://github.com/matschaffer/knife-solo
[2] https://github.com/jedi4ever/mccloud
[3] https://github.com/mlinderm/vagrant-aws

We're looking at the same thing at the moment and we've gone with AWS CloudFormation. There's a whitepaper on it from Amazon here:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/cloudformation-examples/IntegratingAWSCloudFormationWithOpscodeChef.pdf

That's from this page:
http://aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/aws-cloudformation-articles-and-tutorials/

Various templates are available here:
http://aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/aws-cloudformation-templates/

That's not to say the tools you've mentioned won't work, but I've not used them.

Cheers
Nick