[chef] Re: Re: Re: Re: Puppet+Hiera vs. Chef, or handling the occasional special snowflake server

["Julian C. Dunn" < >]

Does this help?

https://docs.chef.io/dsl_recipe.html#tag-tagged-untag

- Julian

On Tue, Oct 6, 2015 at 10:13 PM, Fabien Delpierre
<
 >
 wrote:
> Lamont,
> Your mention of tags is interesting. I'd actually never heard of them and it
> seems like there's little documentation on the topic.
> Could you share some examples?
>
> On Tue, Oct 6, 2015 at 6:15 PM, Lamont Granquist 
> <
 >
>  wrote:
>>
>>
>> you can use tags (or normal attribute precedence level, which is how tags
>> are implemented) to assign attributes directly to nodes for one-off use
>> cases.
>>
>>
>> On 10/06/2015 01:22 PM, Yoshi Spendiff wrote:
>>
>> But in Chef you have an object which represents each node, so why not just
>> edit that if you want to alter individual nodes?
>>
>> Perhaps I'm not understanding
>>
>> On 6 October 2015 at 13:18, Fabien Delpierre 
>> <
 >
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hello folks,
>>> I'm a user of both Puppet and Chef, I'm more familiar with and prefer the
>>> latter overall, but am required to use the former at work. Recently I was
>>> toying with the idea of moving to Chef, although it's probably not a
>>> realistic option, but it raised a few interesting questions.
>>> While Puppet and Chef do roughly the same thing, they do it in slightly
>>> different ways, and Puppet has something in particular that Chef doesn't
>>> have, which is Hiera.
>>>
>>> If you're not familiar with Hiera, it's a simple way to apply settings to
>>> any number of your servers (from a single node to an entire infrastructure
>>> of thousands), you define the hierarchy of settings yourself -- in a 
>>> sense,
>>> it's kind of like being able to customize Chef's attribute precedence and
>>> having a single environment attached to all your nodes. The link above
>>> explains it a lot better than I can.
>>>
>>> Anyway, I was wondering how one might deal with losing Hiera when moving
>>> from Puppet to Chef. It seems that you could achieve similar results with 
>>> a
>>> mix of cookbooks, roles and environments, like everything else, but at the
>>> cost of ending up with a lot more of them than you'd normally have.
>>>
>>> I guess a different way I might ask this is:
>>> Imagine I have a group of servers, all configured the same way (same run
>>> list, same environment), and I need to change something on just one of 
>>> them.
>>> A common scenario in my environment is having to attach YourKit to a JVM
>>> process.
>>> With Puppet/Hiera, I'd just add a two-line YAML file with the same name
>>> as that one server's FQDN, and when I run Puppet, that YAML file would be
>>> read at compile time and the config change applied without affecting the
>>> other nodes.
>>> With Chef, I'd have to modify the node's run list or take its environment
>>> file, make a copy of it, modify the copy and assign that copied 
>>> environment
>>> to the node instead of the normal env file, lest I affect the other 
>>> servers
>>> in the same group.
>>>
>>> Hiera is also capable of aggregating data from multiple sources into a
>>> single hash or array to be applied to a node during a Puppet agent run.
>>>
>>> Those are things that I never missed for as long as I used Chef, but now
>>> that I know they're out there, I'm wondering how I would handle things
>>> without Hiera.
>>>
>>> So in short, I was wondering if anybody has thoughts on the matter.
>>> Obviously it helps if you have some experience with both tools. I'm far 
>>> from
>>> being a Chef expert so it's possible I'm missing something. Any input is
>>> appreciated. Thanks!
>>> Fabien
>>
>>
>>
>



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