[chef] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Moving role attributes into cookbooks

[Daniel Condomitti < >]

I would just include bc-location::default and place the location-detection logic in that recipe based on the EC2 availability zone or the GCE equivalent. You can always swap out how that’s handled (even a huge case statement for now just to get everything working if you’re facing a deadline) with a better approach later. This way you can keep all that ugly logic abstracted away and out of the rest of your cookbooks. 

We use a combination of chef searches (service discovery), cookbook attributes (node-specific configuration like users and locations) and data bags (environment-specific configuration data and sensitive stuff like keys) which isn’t perfect but it works well for us.

On Monday, March 17, 2014 at 1:07 PM, Douglas Garstang wrote:

Daniel,

Using Jeff's approach above, I'd still need to use 

include_recipe "bc-location::#{some-special-key-to-determine-location}"

in every situation where this data was needed, correct? Am I the only one that thinks this is ugly?

Doug.

On Mon, Mar 17, 2014 at 12:59 PM, Daniel Condomitti < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

You don’t need to use knife-ec2 to get those attributes. Create /etc/chef/hints/ec2.json (empty file is fine) and ohai will automatically set a LOT of instance metadata attributes including ec2.placement_availability_zone.

On Monday, March 17, 2014 at 12:51 PM, Douglas Garstang wrote:

Jeff,

We are using EC2 (and GCE). However, we aren't using knife to provision systems. We weren't able to get the knife ec2 plugin to work with an ssh proxy and gave up in the end.

I just tried a different approach, where I have one cookbook, with one recipe per location. This gets around the issue of having to depend on an arbitrary list of location cookbooks in the metadata.rb of every cookbook we write. However, the trade-off is that I have to do this:

include_recipe "bc-location::#{some-special-key-to-determine-location}"

every single time I need to access location data. This is horrid. I simply can't understand why people keep saying not to use roles. Roles are just so much more convenient. All the include magic is done automatically for you.

Douglas.

On Mon, Mar 17, 2014 at 11:23 AM, Jeff Byrnes < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

Doug:

I’m not sure if you’re using EC2, but if so, and you’re launching instances using knife-ec2, you should have node['ec2']['placement_availability_zone'] available. You could build a single wrapper cookbook, that depends on that attribute’s value, and determines the requisite data center-specific attributes.

-- 

Jeff Byrnes
@berkleebassist

Operations Engineer

EverTrue

704.516.4628

On March 17, 2014 at 1:54:21 PM, Douglas Garstang ( " target="_blank"> ) wrote:

Doing what I read to be a best practice, I just took a bunch of roles that defined set attributes for specific data centers, and moved them into cookbooks, one per location, ie:

bc-location-u1

bc-location.eu1

and so on. I just occurred to me that if I do this, then all cookbooks will need to depend (in the metadata.rb) file on ALL of these location based cookbooks.

is this correct? What am I missing?

Doug

--
Regards,

Douglas Garstang
http://www.linkedin.com/in/garstang
Email: " target="_blank">
Cell: +1-805-340-5627

--
Regards,

Douglas Garstang
http://www.linkedin.com/in/garstang
Email: ">
Cell: +1-805-340-5627