[chef] Re: Re: Re: Re: Cloud Deployments

[Torben Knerr < >]

Hi Nick, John,

thanks for the responses!

I'm giving Mccloud a try now. I like it because it is just as awesome
as Vagrant is, and supports Chef Solo and Puppet standalone.

CloudFormation is too overkill for my use case (single VM), but
interestingly Mccloud supports the definition of stacks based on
CloudFormation templates as well...

Cheers,
Torben


On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 8:37 PM, John Martinez 
<
 >
 wrote:
> 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 
> <
 >
> 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<
 >
>>>   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
>
>