Ohai,
I know this is a perennial bugaboo, but I'm curious how folks are handling internally-developed app deployments with Chef these days, and specifically if anyone has found a good solution that achieves all of the following:
1. When provisioning a new node, Chef can deploy the app(s) that should be on that node. knife ec2 server create … should be the only command I need to run to go from "no server" to "it's added to the LB and handling requests." In other words, you don't need to provision with Chef, then deploy with Capistrano, etc.
2. When running chef-client on nodes that already have some version of the app(s) running, make sure that they all run the same version and upgrade simultaneously and atomically (or as close to that as possible). So, for example, if you were storing a git rev in a data bag as the "current version I want deployed" and then one node kicked off its regular chef-client run and upgraded to that, the other nodes running that app would then still be on an old version of that code. That shouldn't happen, but it would with the simplest use of the Chef deploy resource and the splayed, regular interval chef-client runs.
3. Don't lose the ability to run chef-client automatically at regular intervals on all nodes. This is important. I have better things to do than running Chef code manually on servers when things change (and running that detection algorithm in my brain) and then cleaning up whatever bit rot breakage occurred since the last chef-client run hours/days/weeks/months ago.
It seems the main tension here is #1 requires Chef to be able to kick off a deploy to a single node, whereas #2 requires Chef to either never deploy code to nodes that already have some version of it (and thus require a separate manual process to do simultaneous, atomic upgrades) OR to kick off an orchestrated run across all nodes that need to be upgraded (which really isn't Chef's forte, AFAICT).
Something like Capistrano is handy because multi-server orchestration is its bread and butter, but getting Chef and Capistrano to communicate and share data is… tricky.
If the deploy resource could be configured to only deploy when no version of the app was present (covering #1), or when a defaulted-false parameter were set to true by a manual knife ssh run covering all nodes that run that app, that could work. Does that seem reasonable?
- Wes
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