Getting Started with Chef
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I'm investigating Chef this weekend. Have not used it before. I have used cfEngine and did not like it all that much, very clunky. Chef and Puppet are supposed to be the big leaders in this space.
For anyone interested, as they make it very hard to find, here is the download link for Chef:
http://www.getchef.com/chef/install/
If you have only a few servers, their hosted version (SaaS) is free for up to five servers.
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I read the site... and i'm not sure what it does. dumberize it for me
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@Hubtech said:
I read the site... and i'm not sure what it does. dumberize it for me
It's system automation and configuration management. The core idea is that you "never" have to log into servers anymore (at least not in an admin role) and all configuration is handled remotely. That way you can rebuild rapidly and have a really, really tight grasp on what the configuration of a system actually is. Better control, faster rebuilds, easier scalability. It's not perfect, but it is an interesting concept and especially if you have any number of similar servers it is good. If you have nothing but one-offs, not so much. Reducing the need for backups, though, is huge. In theory you might never need to backup an application server an dthe only backup for a database server might be the data in the database itself. That is assuming you push all packages and configuration from the Chef / Puppet system and you have a logging server like Splunk.
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My Chef install is up and running. I have access to the web interface now! Running on CentOS 6.5 on Rackspace.
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I am curious and i drop by to read about Chef. Interesting
