[chef] Re: weblogic and chef - quick question

[Peter Donald < >]

Hi,

On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 4:59 AM, < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

We are new to Chef
We are still trying to understand the value of Chef.
Could the experts share what Chef could do that Weblogic auto deployment
mechanism cannot do ?

Chef is just an automation tool and you can get it to do what ever you want. We don't use Weblogic but instead have opted for GlassFish. 

In our environment we have chef setup the os, (ie tweak kernel settings, fix up ntp etc), install glassfish, and deploy a range of resources into glassfish. Chef actually invokes the underlying  asadmin command line tool to interact with the running glassfish server. Some of our applications make use of configuration and customizations on the filesystem so we also have chef set that up as well. In some cases we also use chef to run database migrations, queue migrations and other middleware changes while it pauses our ee application. So just recently we could automate the construction of a cluster of populated GlassFish VMs to do load testing and it was no more effort to create one VM than it was to create 30.

If you never have to install the application server, and never care about the underlying OS settings, have no applications that interact with services outside WL and are capable of setting up idempotent deployment scripts then I wouldn't bother with chef ... but I have never quite been in that situation.

--
Cheers,

Peter Donald