[chef] omnibus_updater and AWS bootstrapping

[Morgan Blackthorne < >]

Anyone use this cookbook with dynamically bootstrapped AWS nodes? I basically have a script that looks at information from ElasticBeanstalk to determine which environment a node should be placed in that runs from /etc/rc.local, and creates the client.rb config and executes chef-client -j /etc/chef/bootstrap.json.

My concern with omnibus_updater is that if I bump the chef-client version, nodes will start bootstrapping, hit omnibus_updater, and run into the chef killer. This will mark the run as failed, even though it actually succeeded, resulting in an empty runlist and other badness.

I know there is a kill_chef_on_upgrade setting, but the docs seem to indicate that it is a Very Bad Idea to actually use this. Anyone know more about it who can comment? Alternatively, should I eventually refactor my bootstrap script to check the exit code of chef-client, and if it fails, re-run it again? While that won't help if the server is having issues (or our VPC VPN), it would solve problems with the omnibus updating.

Thoughts? Looking to see if I can find a best practice for dealing with this here, other than baking a new AMI any time I really need to update the version... baking the AMI is easy (I've got it pretty well scripted at this point), but then I've got to copy it across regions and update a dozen or two EBs to use the new ones.

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