[chef] Re: Chef Server vs Chef Solo and MCollective

[KC Braunschweig < >]

On Thu, Aug 30, 2012 at 7:49 PM, bradford 
<
 >
 wrote:
> [1] 
> http://www.slideshare.net/jweiss/build-your-own-clouds-with-chef-and-mcollective
> (slide 25/61)

- Complex?
Chef server does have a number of components. The chef-server cookbook
will handle most of this for you reasonably well. If you use opscode
hosted chef or private chef, this is a non-issue.

- concept of different environments?
Environments exist and are a first order concept in chef as of
v0.10.0. Maybe he was looking at an older version? Also with hosted or
private chef you can use multiple "organizations" too, which are like
logical chef servers. There are existing knife plugins in the
community that implement workflows people use for promoting stuff
between environments and/or organizations.

- didn't want to run multiple chef servers?
Unnecessary, environments are a thing.

- lifecycle events?
I don't know what he means. The bootstrap concept is well defined. If
you're written your recipes correctly, the box is fully configured in
1 run so there is no partially converged state to report back about.

- pull/push?
When we did application deployment with chef at my last company we
looked and puppet+mcollective first. What we found was that the push
model we envisioned with mcollective we could basically do as a pull
model with chef-server's built-in search api and it was much simpler
to get started. We found people think they want push much more than is
needed. Push models have their place, but you have to be very careful
about creating coupling. The pull model is more likely to force you to
keep things nicely decoupled so nodes can do their thing and
independently converge on your goal state. It takes a little thought
up front, but I think it's less likely to lead you down a dark path.

Hope that helps.

KC