[chef] Re: Re: Re: Any experiences building on top of Chef?

[Joseph Holsten < >]

knife is great for adding, modifying and deleting data in your chef server. 
But it's way too general purpose for our node workflow. We want to make it 
idiot proof to ensure instance sizes, cloud-init user data, chef roles and 
hostnames all are consistent. 

So we're similar developing tooling and workflow around cloud-init 
bootstrapping. We're implementing it as a knife plugin, but we're trying to 
get it so we only use our plugin's actions for actual node workflow. We're 
planning on extracting this into a standalone set of thor scripts once we've 
got all the use cases locked down.

Andrew: I'd be very interested in seeing your specific implementation, 
especially how you're bootstrapping secrets, and what metadata you keep where.
--
~j



On 2013-06-11, at 15:52, Andrew Gross 
<
 >
 wrote:

> I recommend moving away from `knife` for orchestration.  It is a great 
> command line tool, but is not intended for heavy automation.
> 
> Use the REST Api, either through Chef or Ridley.
> If possible, make it so you don't have to SSH in to bootstrap nodes (we are 
> on EC2 and use User Data w/ cloud-init).
> 
> Our automation is Python with Boto, and a dash of PyChef.  Our primary 
> development language is python so it makes it easier for me to work with 
> other developers and forces cleaner interfaces between the infrastructure 
> and Chef.
> 
> In our case we use Boto to set up cloud formation templates instead of 
> configuring Zookeeper. Either is very workable once you don't need to SSH 
> for bootstrapping. 
> 
> 
> On Tue, Jun 11, 2013 at 12:36 PM, Noah Kantrowitz 
> <
 >
>  wrote:
> 
> On Jun 11, 2013, at 5:32 AM, Jeppe Nejsum Madsen wrote:
> 
> > Ohai,
> >
> > I would be interested in hearing how people are building tools on top of 
> > Chef. Basically I'm thinking an orchestration layer with simple tasks 
> > such as "spin up a new qa environment with latest build", "shutdown all 
> > dev environments" etc.
> >
> >
> >
> > We have all the low level components done with Chef. And while everything 
> > works using e.g. knife commands, it would be nice to shield e.g. QA from 
> > having to install chef, clone repo, remember long command lines etc.
> >
> > So, are there any good tools for these scenarios? If you've built your 
> > own, how did you approach it it? Using knife, the Chef gem or the Chef 
> > REST Api?
> 
> http://pychef.readthedocs.org/en/latest/fabric.html if you are a fan of ;
> Fabric (hint: you should be).
> 
> --Noah
> 
>