Preview: Chef 0.8 and the Opscode Platform

  • October 7, 2009
  • By Barry Steinglass
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Folks using Chef already know its the easiest and best way to get an automated server infrastructure up and running. We here at Opscode have been hard at work making it even easier. In his latest episode of the Opscode Screencast, CTO Adam Jacob gives a sneak peek of what’s coming in the Chef 0.8 release, along with the first details of a new service that we’re close to launching.

In the video, Adam shows how to create a new infrastructure in EC2, consisting of two Apache web servers behind a dynamically configured HAProxy load balancer.

You can apply for early access here.

We’ll be selecting a few customers to help us prove out the platform before opening it up.


Opscode is Hiring!


14 Comments
  • Eren Karayigit
  • October 7, 2009
  • Reply

It was a nice introduction to chef for me.
Would like to evalute but couldn't find the form :) Can't wait to try it.

Thanks.

  • Jan Zimmek
  • October 7, 2009
  • Reply

nice screencasts. we currently use puppet to automate our ec2 deployments.

the ability to search all chef clients is really great and simplifies dynamic generations of haproxy, nagios, munin, etc. configs a lot.

regards
jan

The form is at www.opscode.com/alpha. I'll update the blog post to mention this.

This looks great, guys! Really looking forward to this release.

Very cool video Adam.

Could also update from an rm to a2dissite.

execute “a2dissite default” do
only_if { File.exists?(“/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default”) }
end

  • Erik
  • October 22, 2009
  • Reply

We are really excited about Chef. Quick question:

During the screencast, you mentioned that you could fire up hundreds of nodes and the load balancer would be automatically updated. Does that mean that we don’t need to run ‘chef_client’ again on the load balancer to regenerate the haproxy configuration file after creating a new web server?

If we do have to run it, what is the best way to notify the load balancer after the creation of a new web server?

Hi Erik,

The next time Chef runs on the load balancer client, it would pick up the changes. You could also rig up a trigger across the message queue, but at this time we don’t have any examples of that yet.

  • Erik
  • October 28, 2009
  • Reply

jtimberman,

I believe I have inferred from some of the presentations and samples that it is a best practice to have Chef client run regularly as a cron job. Is that accurate?

Erik,

Some people are doing that, but by default we set up the Chef client as a runit service.

  • dreamcat four
  • October 31, 2009
  • Reply

This is really improved, but just suggest one thing because SSL server requires a fixed ip and rather difficult whilst on the road / moving around with a laptop. What i’d suggest is an option in the metadata giving SSH tunnel for the SSL connection. Because ssh can work acceptably over dynamic ip. `ssh-keyscan $HOSTNAME` will give fingerprint that clients connect to. Send fingerprint and ip to clients and can tunnel HTTP/SSL to appaer on high port of localhost with self-signed cert.

I have been trying something like this with chef-server 0.7.14. Unfortunately this strategy fails on 0.7. It goes wrong when creating the new client node’s OpenId (the chef-server does not complete). It seems to be an OpenId related issue, so hopefully does not exist on 0.8 line ?

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