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I just started digging into chef with the intention of using with AWS opsworks and... holy complexity. There just doesn't seem to be any obvious entry point, a

by pault 13y ago

I just started digging into chef with the intention of using with AWS opsworks and... holy complexity. There just doesn't seem to be any obvious entry point, as far as I can tell. I've spent two entire days searching and there doesn't seem to be anything in between "hello wordpress" and "read this 300+ page user manual". Can anyone recommend a hands on guide for setting up a multi-node stack with opsworks that isn't just plain vanilla templates? I was really impressed by Richard Seroter's videos on AWS at pluralsight, but they are more of a 30,000 foot overview and gloss over implementation details, for the most part (even at 10+ hours). The project I'm working on is mostly a pretty straightforward node service running on postgres, but it uses some custom services that need to scale horizontally, and host sensitive data that should probably be running in a VPC. Edit: I'm also having a difficult time trying to figure out how to get up to speed with chef in the specific context of opsworks, since most of the chef-specific courseware I can find assumes I'm using a hosted chef server, and I'm not quite sure how that overlaps with the opsworks flavor. It's starting to feel like I'll be at this for another week before I can get even a simple stack running.

mateuszf 13y ago
Try with ansible.
- deckiedan 13y ago
  Agreed. As well as the reasonably good ansible documentation, checkout the ansible-examples github repo. ( https://github.com/ansible/ansible-examples https://github.com/ansible/ansible-examples ) There's a few initial 'conventions' to figure out (roles, group vars, playbooks), but then it's so incredibly simple to get into. My dad is playing with a raspberry pi at home, wanting to set up a web kiosk thing. I'd been doing something similar a few months ago for work, so I send him my ansible playbook. He could follow it as if it were a plain text checklist/tutorial, without needing ansible at all. If he wants to automate it, he can. That, I think, is one of the benefits of ansible. It's not a lot more work than just writing an overview of what you need to do in the first place, but with the benefit of it being repeatable and automated.
blueskin_ 13y ago
Chef is a bad bet if you don't want unnecessary complexity - it's practically designed to be unnecessarily complex.
talkingquickly 13y ago
Not aimed at exactly this use case but the first two thirds of my book Reliably Deploying Rails Applications https://leanpub.com/deploying_rails_applications https://leanpub.com/deploying_rails_applications is heavily chef focussed. It's intended for use with Chef Solo but potentially the early sections on writing custom chef cookbooks may be of use.
jnsaff2 13y ago
We just built a simple tool that generates Ansible playbooks for you. Try it out at https://cmify.com https://cmify.com
vidarh 13y ago
It's what always kept me away from these systems. So many of them are hopelessly over-engineered to the point where it's often easier to write custom solutions.
sergiosgc 13y ago
Chef smells over engineered from the get go. Try salt stack, or ansible. I've settled with Salt, but I believe they are both equally good solutions. Puppet is also OK, even if we moved away from it (towards Salt) because of poor performance (on a deployment of about 100 physical servers plus the VMs running on top of them).

by pault 13y ago

mateuszf 13y ago

Try with ansible.

deckiedan 13y ago
Agreed. As well as the reasonably good ansible documentation, checkout the ansible-examples github repo. ( https://github.com/ansible/ansible-examples https://github.com/ansible/ansible-examples ) There's a few initial 'conventions' to figure out (roles, group vars, playbooks), but then it's so incredibly simple to get into. My dad is playing with a raspberry pi at home, wanting to set up a web kiosk thing. I'd been doing something similar a few months ago for work, so I send him my ansible playbook. He could follow it as if it were a plain text checklist/tutorial, without needing ansible at all. If he wants to automate it, he can. That, I think, is one of the benefits of ansible. It's not a lot more work than just writing an overview of what you need to do in the first place, but with the benefit of it being repeatable and automated.

blueskin_ 13y ago

Chef is a bad bet if you don't want unnecessary complexity - it's practically designed to be unnecessarily complex.

talkingquickly 13y ago

Not aimed at exactly this use case but the first two thirds of my book Reliably Deploying Rails Applications https://leanpub.com/deploying_rails_applications https://leanpub.com/deploying_rails_applications is heavily chef focussed. It's intended for use with Chef Solo but potentially the early sections on writing custom chef cookbooks may be of use.

jnsaff2 13y ago

We just built a simple tool that generates Ansible playbooks for you. Try it out at https://cmify.com https://cmify.com

vidarh 13y ago

It's what always kept me away from these systems. So many of them are hopelessly over-engineered to the point where it's often easier to write custom solutions.

sergiosgc 13y ago

Chef smells over engineered from the get go. Try salt stack, or ansible. I've settled with Salt, but I believe they are both equally good solutions. Puppet is also OK, even if we moved away from it (towards Salt) because of poor performance (on a deployment of about 100 physical servers plus the VMs running on top of them).