Should I use Chef or another server management tool

Question

I have 4 servers behind a load balancer and an intermediate server, a db server and a utility server for a web application that hosts several websites.

Should I make the switch to Chef to manage these servers or just save them manually? The servers were built using scattering, but at that time there were only two. Now that there are four services, it becomes more and more a problem.

I would like to hear the impressions and pros and cons of the chef and other chefs.

Thanks!

Answer 1

The chef has a steep learning curve, so it will take some time - at least a few weeks to become familiar with how to use it.

But as soon as you pick up the basics, it is a very convenient system and can simplify any number of tasks - even for the smallest of infrastructures.

A few notes to get you started.

• You will create and tear down cloud servers dozens of times, just to hang it. Experiment.

• The opscode standard cookbooks (github.com/opscode/cookbooks) are very useful. But you will need to expand / customize many of them for your specific case. And you will need to look for a "network for cookbooks that are not in the opscode / cookbooks repository."

• Read the opscode cookbooks and read the 37signals cookbooks.

• The application and database focus on standard Rails applications with MySQL and Memcached. To the extent that this describes you, you will succeed.

Answer 2

We went to the chef, and now we have a 1 minute break for our application. So it certainly pays off.

However, it took a long time (several months) to get to the point that we were satisfied with the chef’s deployment strategy. Looking back, we would have some spare boxes to try out the deployment from scratch. Of course, I would not advise a chef in a production environment without an exact tuning mirror and many, many tests, and I would not advise using a chef on an installation that was not “cheffed” from scratch.

Having said that, the chef is much better than the other options that we looked at, and now that we are on the other side, it is a breeze deploying the new version of the application on several servers. In the future I will use it for any intermediate or production environment that I have.

In general, yes, but only if your client / employer knows that it may take some time before they see the benefits that will be significant.