[chef] removing autoscaled-down nodes from chef server?

[Denis Haskin < >]

Looking for input on how to handle this: we use AWS's autoscaling to dynamically manage the number of front-end nodes against traffic, but we configure and provision the nodes with chef, so they do get registered with our chef server.

However, when the AWS autoscaling takes nodes down as traffic declines, they don't get de-registered from the chef server, so we're accumulating lots of invalid entries in our chef server.  Makes using the chef search facility sub-optimal (e.g. run a knife ssh command against a set of nodes that you've identified by search, but a lot of them aren't there any more so it takes a long time as the ssh requests time out, etc).

Suggestions on how to handle this?  I believe (and am checking) that nodes get an orderly shutdown when autoscaling decides they're not needed any more, so I guess I can hook into something there (these are ubuntu).  Is that the best approach?

Thanks,

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Denis Haskin