[chef] Re: Chef AWS server with nodes in multiple regions

[Avishai Ish-Shalom < >]

Yes, there actually a few solutions which i'm employing. first, you could use https with your chef server and expose the chef-server cross-region with elastic ip or DNS endpoints. this solution is very easy but can slow down chef-runs, especially the first where files are not cached yet. This can be quite annoying if you are using autoscaling.
second, you can use two separate chef servers and manage them using different knife.rb instances. this add some overhead but can be beneficial if you want to separate your systems.
lastly, chef servers can operate in a various cluster modes: master-master, master-slave and various mix n' match modes; e.g. you could have master/slave where the slave is read only (classic) or (my favorite for wan replication) master/master for couchdb, master/slave for solr, master slave for files (/var/lib/chef/cookbook_index) and federation/shovel for rabbitmq. there are other combination that will work well over wan, but i find this combo to be the easiest to setup and maintain. I'm currently using this setup with the master in eu-west-1 and a slave in us-east-1 and this chopped 3 minutes off the chef run. it also allows high availability if you combine this with some failover logic (global dns traffic manager or client side logic).

Regards,
Avishai

On 08/08/12 10:18, Morgan Blackthorne wrote:

" type="cite">Just wondering how others approach this situation. Elastic IPs aren't viable as we'll have nodes in autoscaling groups, etc.

One approach mentioned in #chef was to launch the EC2 nodes inside VPC, and then link the regions via VPC. We'd end up paying for that, but it's an option. Any others? I'm not sure I want to (on short notice) add VPC into the mix while I'm on a deadline, though. 

Does Chef support the concept of slave servers, where I could have a server host in each region with an ElasticIP that pulls from the master host?

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