[chef] Rebuilding ephemeral chef servers

[Andrew Brown < >]

Ohai Chefs!

I’m investigating building an ephemeral chef server that could be rebuilt in a cloud environment.  We already have a solution for re-populating all of our cookbooks, environment files, and roles; however the node data and client keys are problematic, since chef-client always tries to use client.pem if it exists.

I’ve written a small utility to check whether the client key is valid, by fetching /nodes/<fqdn> once per minute, and deleting client.pem if authentication fails.  Would this put excessive load on the Chef Server to have this many requests?  Are there alternate solutions folks have used to solve this problem?

Thanks!

Andrew