[chef] aws autoscaling and chef cleanup

[Sam Darwin < >]

If using AWS auto-scaling + Chef, the final step of instance cleanup seems to
be slightly unclear.    

One solution is to run a script in /etc/rc0.d which is called on shutdown.  
"knife node delete".    This requires knife to be configured and working on 
the
instance, which is a (minor) pain.    This method will also fail for an abrupt
machine crash.

Another solution is to have a script which queries chef server for instances
that haven't checked in for a while, and removes those.   That would require
having chef-client running very often or as a daemon.    

I wonder what the security implications would be of adding functionality into
chef-client:

chef-client --remove-self-from-server

Some people have posted about a script which checks for terminated instances
and removes them.   this sounds like the best way.    Perhaps they mean to
query AWS first, and then make changes to chef-server.    now to figure out
how...