[chef] Re: Re: Thoughts on service monitoring...

[Jamie Winsor < >]

One of the reasons I have been a huge advocate of setting all dependencies that your cookbook may leverage as explicit dependencies in the metadata is that Berkshelf just handles the retrieval and uploading of that dependency for you. It does nothing more than take up a minimal amount of disk space on your nodes and the only danger is if a cookbook was written so unfortunately that it stomps on other cookbooks.

With ruby gems, if you have platform specific gem dependencies then you package different gems with different dependencies. This could potentially be another solution for us but would require quite a bit of additional legwork around cookbook packaging and distribution.

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Jamie Winsor

@resetexistence

https://github.com/reset

On Monday, November 26, 2012 at 10:01 AM, Jeffrey Hulten wrote:

On Nov 25, 2012, at 4:20 PM, Peter Donald wrote:

Hi,

On Thu, Nov 22, 2012 at 5:37 AM, Jeffrey Hulten < "> > wrote:

There are multiple ways to keep a service up from runit to bluepill, but everyone uses something different. I don't know a lot about these tools, would there be a way to make a generalized resource or an extension to the service resource that managed this?

I suspect if you were to take an opinionated stance on services then it would be possible to do this. One of the main reasons I would like this is to make some of the cookbooks I write more compatible with RHEL systems - right now, most of the cookbooks we create use upstart which is one of the few things that stop them being RHEL compatible.

In the next month we plan on looking on replacing upstart usage with runit (or something else?) and I had it on my list to investigate [1] to see if that could be integrated into chef. Hearsay says they have already done most of the hardwork.

[1] https://github.com/ddollar/foreman

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Cheers,

Peter Donald

A lot of my thinking is based on our discussions at the community summit. Cookbook dependencies are become more important as we use tools like Berkshelf, but many cookbooks depend on things that are not required in every case.

For instance the nginx cookbook depends on both runit and bluepill. You are not going to use both at the same time, but the tools don't know that.

If, however, we had a way to tell the service resource to use runit or bluepill based on an attribute and defaulted to the standard OS method otherwise then we could eliminate the dependency on the tool we aren't using.

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Jeffrey Hulten

Principal Consultant at Automated Labs, LLC

"> 206-853-5216

Skype: jeffhulten