Ex-Amazon 'Master of Disaster' animates server Chef Opscode — the Seattle-based startup lead by Amazon's former "Master of Disaster" — has introduced an online service for overseeing the use of its open source Chef framework, a means of juggling server configurations atop so-called infrastructure clouds such as Amazon EC2 and in good ol' private data centers. Distributed …
"Sounds like you've never had to deal with any large deployments."
Just fortune 150s, nothing country sized.
"Here's a job for you to do manually: configure 20 new servers of three types for a production-quality deployment. You have 10 minutes."
As a consultant, I would fire the management who came up with such an unrealistic concept. On the spot, no questions asked. HTH, HAND.
"When you launch an instance for web serving, for example, you can call a series of recipes that install and configure Apache. "When a new node comes up, you define it as a webserver and Chef will take all the actions necessary to bring that server into production as an Apache server and do something useful," Opscode director of business operations Bryan Hale tells The Reg." .....
One does assume that its "do something useful" is extra icing on the cake in a launching with an Internet Exploitation Service Provider patching Apache Networks through Host Booty Servers for All Party Delivery and Virtual Feasting on Addictive Attractive Astute Future Content.
Definite Vision with MetaDataBased DCodeXSSXXXX Security Operation for all the obvious reasons of stealthy surprise to bombard the heathen and decimate the barbarian who would challenge Global Operating Devices working for Real and SurReal. :-)
Now,.... was there ever as Soft a Lovers'Kiss on the Bone of Contention ..... was there ever a Caress so Thoughtful and Inviting?
And that question goes to Blighty's Flighty Cyber Command Forces crunching Code and Phorming Planforms and Platforms for GCHQ Satellites, who may or may not be present and AWOL/Missing in Action ....... for some discoveries and special taught skills are all too easily converted into negative criminal abuse and rogue selfish personal actions rather than more fully advanced as Intelligence Community ZerodDay trades, and that always attracts cleansing ordnance fire to remove all elements of future blockage.
Chef is mostly an evolution of cfengine, and it's a completely different approach to puppet.
The key approach of chef's config management is convergence - instead of having scripts that say 'do this', you have recipes that say 'make it like this', which mean it's much less sensitive to varying starting config - for example a script that tries to install apache and add options to a config file is likely to cause problems if it's already been done (e.g. enabling the same PHP extension more than once causes errors). Chef takes care of that. It also deals with higher-level constructs spanning multiple devices such as 'attach all servers that are configured as web servers as back-ends to this load balancer'; configuring a new server as a web server would automatically add it to the balancer (if you want that of course). It can also work backwards - simply remove apache from your config, and it will get uninstalled cleanly.
All that said, chef is still pretty new and changing fast, which makes it a little hard to keep up with, not a welcome characteristic of a config management system.
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