
Data Driven Application Deployment with Chef - jesserobbins
http://www.opscode.com/blog/2010/05/06/data-driven-application-deployment-with-chef/
======
gte910h
I honestly want a _good excuse_ to use chef for a server config. Something
like a series of rackspace nodes or the like.

I'm interested to hear about how long it took to get up to speed with making
reasonably simple nodes come up in a fully automated fashion with chef.

~~~
pie
I use chef for about 10-15 slicehost nodes at work (in production for about 3
months now). It's worked well thus far but requires writing some bootstrap
scripts for installing chef on a fresh instance and a fair amount of diving
into the DSL (and sparse areas of documentation) depending on your needs.

I also developed all my recipes from scratch (didn't use any of the preset
opscode stuff, though those are great examples of what can be done and very
useful for standard installations of things). I haven't worked with the new
recipes mentioned either, but it looks like chef is beginning to grow into
some of the potential created by some of the recent infrastructure
enhancements.

The whole ordeal probably took about two weeks of learning, tuning, and
testing, but it could be MUCH quicker for more standard and homogenous server
stacks - you can start with recipes used by Engine Yard and 37signals, for
example.

