[chef] Re: Re: Re: Decomposed Chef Server install

["Julian C. Dunn" < >]

Sure. The work basically looks something like this.

Our customers have told us loud & clear that they want a real HA
solution, i.e. in the distributed systems lingo, an AP system. We're
building this first on AWS because it forces you to address network
partitions and unavailable instances as part of life, so it's a great
petri dish.

Architecturally, what this means is:

* Where possible, Chef Server will be configured to utilize native AWS
primitives to externalize all the data stores -- ELB, RDS, S3 for
cookbooks (no change from today), and CloudSearch as a stretch goal
instead of Solr.
* Every server node at that point that sits behind the ELB will just
be stateless, hosting the services like nginx, redis, oc_id, erchef,
authz i.e. bifrost, bookshelf, etc. but won't hold any data.

Countermeasures for addressing the loss of "C" (consistency) in the
system design are improving our backup & restore procedure and
simplifying the # of services in Chef server (e.g. removal of
opscode-expander & RabbitMQ).

We hope to have a beta available by the beginning of Q4 for select
customers that we're working with individually, with a final build
sometime in Q4.

Does that help?

- Julian

On Thu, Sep 24, 2015 at 6:42 PM, Ameir Abdeldayem 
<
 >
 wrote:
> Thanks, Julian; that's exactly what I'm looking for. Are you able to share
> further information on that project? It sounds like it'd solve our itch
> quite well.
>
> Thanks,
> Ameir
>
> On Sep 24, 2015 6:10 PM, "Julian C. Dunn" 
> <
 >
>  wrote:
>>
>> We (at Chef Software) are working on a project to allow customers to
>> externalize many of the data stores utilized by Chef Server for
>> exactly this purpose -- for example, being able to use an external
>> PostgreSQL (in RDS, if you want), CloudSearch instead of Solr, and so
>> on. Is that what you're asking?
>>
>> - Julian
>>
>> On Thu, Sep 24, 2015 at 5:20 AM, Ameir A. 
>> <
 >
>>  wrote:
>> > Hello,
>> >
>> > We're currently running Chef Server with the monolithic installer, with
>> > everything running on one node; the only exception is that the bookshelf 
>> > is
>> > backed by S3.
>> >
>> > I've been asked to investigate resiliency, and in that effort, would
>> > like to split Chef Server up by its individual components, and offload 
>> > what
>> > I can to managed services (like Redis And Postgres on Elasticache and 
>> > RDS,
>> > respectively).
>> >
>> > I found the following image, with a breakdown of the different
>> > components:
>> > https://docs.chef.io/_images/chef_server_ha.svg
>> >
>> > Suppose I were to split each component into its own Docker container
>> > (which isn't what I'm set on, necessarily, but for the sake of 
>> > discussion);
>> > how would I do so?  Is it possible via the RPM/DEB packages to just 
>> > install
>> > individual components?  Also, is it safe to assume that all state is 
>> > present
>> > solely in Redis, Postgres, and Solr (and the bookshelf, of course)?
>> >
>> > Any insight would be well-appreciated.
>> >
>> > Thanks,
>> > Ameir
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> [ Julian C. Dunn 
>> <
 >
>>           * Sorry, I'm    ]
>> [ WWW: http://www.aquezada.com/staff/julian    * only Web 1.0  ;]
>> [ gopher://sdf.org/1/users/keymaker/           * compliant!    ;]
>> [ PGP: 91B3 7A9D 683C 7C16 715F 442C 6065 D533 FDC2 05B9       ]



-- 
[ Julian C. Dunn 
<
 >
          * Sorry, I'm    ]
[ WWW: http://www.aquezada.com/staff/julian    * only Web 1.0  ;]
[ gopher://sdf.org/1/users/keymaker/           * compliant!    ;]
[ PGP: 91B3 7A9D 683C 7C16 715F 442C 6065 D533 FDC2 05B9       ]