[chef] Re: Re: Recipes doing status checkins?

[Daniel DeLeo < >]

On Thursday, August 29, 2013 at 5:23 PM, Larry Wright wrote:

I've done this with a data bag. Just write to a 'progress' data bag at each interval. As long as the data bag is only used for this purpose, there shouldn't be any concurrency issues.

Hope this helps.

Larry

On Aug 29, 2013, at 3:50 PM, Brad Knowles < "> > wrote:

Folks,

I'm curious to know what the current best practice is with regards to keeping your central chef server updated with current run state information as you go through a lengthy process? Do you have each recipe doing a node.set on an attribute and then a node.save? If so, how "heavy" is a node.save operation?

I know that we need to avoid writing to data bags, because they don't support multiple simultaneous writers. However, other than using attributes and doing a node.save, I can't think of any obvious way to have my recipes storing centrally available information on their current runtime status.

This depends on your design. If you design the item keys so that every node gets its own key, then you don't have to worry about races.

That said, neither data bags nor node data are designed for this, so you either consider exporting data to an external service or be ready to do so when you outgrow this approach.

-- 

Daniel DeLeo