[chef] Re: Bootstrapping a lot of nodes

[Ranjib Dey < >]

i use ansible or knife-ssh (as api, not as cli). bootstrapping has always been pain, because its ssh based, and also i needed ordered bootstrapping (ops services -> persistence layer -> backends -> frontends -> load balancers). 

spice weasel is awesome if you can model everything using knife cli.

if you want to parallelize certain steps. retry , callbacks  then ansible can do those (like send a failure metric to statds if certain step fails). first use case (parallel execution) can be done with with yaml only interface, callbacks require python.

chef-metal is new kid in this zone :-) . its super alpha but it lets you do all of these assuming you are running a controller node somewhere (may be your workstation) and environment is modeled as chef recipe (chef-metal provides machine as a resource).

note: knife-ssh is also fairly easy to extend, and you can build custom knife extensions for your bootstrapping needs.

On Wed, May 21, 2014 at 10:00 AM, "> < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

Hi,

  We have a requirement soon to add  several hundred nodes to our OpenSource Chef server. My question is: does anyone know a good way to handle this?

  I’ve googled quite a lot and cannot find much info about do a ‘mass bootstrapping’.

I will have a list of Environments and the nodes contained within those environments, and I suspect with a little ruby code I could get a script together to parse a file containing this information and bootstrap nodes appropriately, but this seems a little inelegant.

  Are there tools out there to help? Anyone devise a good method to do this?

 

Thanks

Chris