[chef] Re: Is Chef a good fit for Java deployments?

[Joseph Holsten < >]

You're describing exactly what we do at Simply Measured. Hard version pins 
manually updated for prod, continuous delivery of snapshots for staging, 
artifacts in nexus.

We use an ancient version of the nexus repo cookbook: 
https://github.com/RiotGames/nexus-cookbook, and are considering reworking ;
our home grown artifact deploys to use 
https://github.com/RiotGames/artifact-cookbook.

BTW, I'm pretty sure that there's a significant number of chef shops with 
non-trivial java environments. I think they're just less ostentatious than 
rubyists like me.
--
Joseph Holsten

On 2013-05-31, at 09:15, 

 
 wrote:

> My company is looking at a way to automate Java deployments, and manage
> environments. There are tools from the Java community that will automate
> deployments, but they won't do configuration management more broadly, and 
> none
> of them are terribly well established. 
> 
> Our environments are relatively diverse, but to start with, we'd like to 
> manage
> a collection of apps running on Tomcat servers. We build with Maven and 
> deploy
> CI snapshots and releases to an internal Nexus repository. In an ideal 
> world,
> I'd like to be able to do two things:
> 
> 1. When a new release occurs, tell Chef that test servers should receive 
> that
> release by incrementing the version number. Then have Chef download the
> binaries from Nexus (which I'm sure it can do with its Maven resource), and
> pass them to Tomcat. It seems to me this should be pretty easy.
> 
> 2. On development servers, have Chef continuously check the snapshots on 
> Nexus
> and perform the same installation procedure when an update occurs. This also
> seems like it's probably achievable.
> 
> What worries me is that Chef doesn't seem to be very widely used for Java
> environments, and I'm wondering if there's a reason. Am I going down the 
> wrong
> road, or does it seem like this is a good fit?
> 
> For background, Chef will also need to configure agents for Logstash and 
> Nagios
> (which I know it can do), and update an XML file that defines Logback 
> logging
> configuration for Tomcat.