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

["John E. Vincent (lusis)" < >]

On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 12:11 PM, Sean OMeara 
<
 >
 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.
>

Because up until erchef, Chef Server was a bit of a pain ;) I say this
as someone who had no problems setting it up. Yes there were various
solo-based cookbooks but the number of moving parts was hard to
swallow and manage.

Additionally, Chef server now becomes another dependency to your
environment and must be treated as such from an HA perspective. Not
everyone was/is able to use hosted chef.

> -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
>>
>>
>>