[chef] On Chef patterns - ways to organize a Chef kitchen

[Marcelo Serpa < >]

Hi list,

I’m wondering Chef kitchen patterns. Right now, I use knife-solo, and I have a general-purpose kitchen. I add nodes as needed (not necessarily for the same app). Since I don’t really deal with a project that requires a more than one (or two) server(s), yet, it’s easy to just do something like:

➜  mykitchenv2 git:(master) ✗ ls

Berksfile      Berksfile.lock Gemfile        Gemfile.lock   Vagrantfile    cookbooks      data_bags      environments   nodes          roles          site-cookbooks

➜  roles git:(master) ✗ ls

lamp.json      rack.json

➜  nodes git:(master) ✗ ls

127.0.0.1.json       anotherhost.json …

So, it’s basically a general-purpose kitchen. It’s not really geared towards a specific application. My workflow looks like this:

1) New project, hack, app ready to be deployed

2) Create new VM @ digital ocean, grab the IP, create a new node json in the kitchen

4) It’s probably a Rails app. Add the rack role[lamp] to the run_list for this node. The rack role basically setups a new rack box using the rackbox cookbook (https://github.com/teohm/rackbox-cookbook)

3) knife solo prepare

4) knife solo cook

5) Use capistrano to deploy the app.

Then, I do the same thing if I need a staging server.

It works pretty well. However, most of the apps I develop right now are apps with a quite simple infrastructure. They don’t require more than 2 servers (prod,staging). I did work with more elaborated apps before with up to 10 different servers (but without using Chef at the time, go figure). 

The problem with this approach is that I end up having several unrelated nodes, and in the end, I don’t really describe the infrastructure of a single app/system, but of several ones, which can become clunky. Basically, for now, I’m just using Chef to get the sever ready, but not really using it to *manage* the server afterwards.

That being said, I’d like some insights on Chef patterns related to this, for example,  when is it time to create a kitchen solely for an app? 

Thanks in advance,

-- 

Marcelo