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

["John E. Vincent (lusis)" < >]

On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 2:37 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

Not entirely true. Knife bootstraps are all custom templates anyway.
Nothing says you can't use a custom bootstrap template that just calls
chef-solo instead of chef-client.

> 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
>
>