[chef] Re: Re: Advice sought on Chef-ifying heterogeneous mess of Unices

[Lamont Granquist < >]

On 9/20/12 7:10 PM, Phil Dibowitz wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 20, 2012 at 09:52:33PM -0400, Christopher DeMarco wrote:
> > 1.  Where to start?  I began learning by putting my .emacs and .bashrc
> > everywhere.  While that was cute, it quickly became more trouble than it was
> > worth, because I didn't automate anything of high risk, value or volume.
> You start by picking one system, and pulling one config at a time until
> everything you are about on that system is controlled by Chef. Then you add
> more systems.
I've typically found it works better to deploy configuration management 
everywhere (doing nothing), and get it integrated on all new builds, 
then start with the trivial and uniform things like ntp and dns and get 
them working.  Then figure out what the largest common "style" of app 
deployment is and start to focus on more comprehensively doing full 
stacks once you've got a solid base role across all the servers.

I would recommend that you not radically change things around, unless it 
is done uniformly.  I've done a post mortem on one failed attempt at 
deploying configuration management across a large, heterogenous 
environment that failed because the servers that were under config 
management looked nothing like the other servers and after the CM 
deployment failed after fully converting a few hundred servers it was 
eventually ripped out completely after the employee left the company and 
the project stalled and the servers that had been converted were the 
'weird' ones that nobody knew how to properly manage.

That is one advantage of tackling things in vertical slices instead of 
fully converting horizontal silos -- if you decide the implement some 
new hotness in {ntp, dns, smtp, whatever} then you fully deploy it 
across the board and get it actually finished before getting ADD and 
moving on to something else.

Anyway, just getting time set right across the board can eliminate the 
tickets, pages and outages caused by incorrectly set clocks.

YMMV.