[chef] Re: Re: My Wishlist: Better Chef-Solo Support

[Torben Knerr < >]

My actual use cases where I prefer Chef solo:

 * one-time setup of infrastructure (e.g. setting up project infrastructure for our development teams as a one-time service - no service included)

 * test environments for testing single cookbooks / recipes

 * simple environments, maybe clustered with a few servers (but no elasticity!)

In these cases I prefer chef solo because it's less complex both in terms of workflow and infrastructure.

What I'd ideally like to have is the choice of doing so with as much chef-client parity as possible. Right now I'm using 

 * knife-solo for deploying servers with chef-solo where I only have plain ssh access

 * mccloud for deploying ec2 instances with chef solo

 * vagrant for local testing with chef solo

Sadly, each of these provide different levels of parity with chef-client, e.g. knife-solo adds search via edelight/chef-solo-search, but this is not supported by the other approaches. I guess all of them support data bags. Not sure if anyone of them already supports environments under chef-solo...

If chef solo already provided that level of parity, it would be a) much easier to switch to chef server and vice versa, b) easier to write / reuse recipes that just work with chef solo and c) existing tools leveraging knife bootstrap (e.g. knife-ec2) would just work as well. 

Plus, If I could always use `knife bootstrap` rather than different commandlines for knife-solo, mccloud and vagrant this would greatly harmonize my workflow.

 

On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 6:11 PM, Sean OMeara < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

I've always been curious about people using chef-solo in cluster
environments...

Why not just use a chef-server instead of moving mountains to to
replicate the functionality it provides?

I'm honestly curious about the use cases.

-s

On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 5:29 AM, Torben Knerr < "> > wrote:

> Ohai Chefs,
>
> are you cooking solo?
>
> I'm trying to figure out a sane way of working with Chef-solo, thereby came
> across lots of useful projects aiming to make the Chef-solo experience
> better, e.g.:
>
>  * https://github.com/matschaffer/knife-solo
>  * https://github.com/tobami/littlechef
>  * https://github.com/edelight/chef-solo-search
>  * ...
>
> They add features which are currently missing from Chef solo, e.g.
>  * data_bags (also encrypted data_bags)
>  * search (within node and data_bags)
>  * environments support
>
> There is also a proof of concept which integrates knife-solo with the `knife
> bootstrap` command by passing a `--solo` option, which lets you
> transparently use knife-ec2, knife-rackspace, etc. (name any plugin which
> uses `knife bootstrap`) with Chef solo as well.
>
> It seems to me that there is much demand for better Chef-solo integration in
> the community, but unfortunately this is not there yet and you have to
> cherry-pick specific patches from the approaches above if you want a better
> Chef solo experience.
>
> I'd really love to see these approaches being integrated into core Chef and
> have a single and consistent way of working with it.
>
> Is there anything that prevents this from happening or is it just that
> nobody had done it yet?
>
> Cheers, Torben
>
>
>