It maybe doesn't fit the bill of simple, but it's not too dreadfully hard to get set up if you only want it to fulfill some relatively straightforward tasks like you describe.
Thanks. I'll take a look at it again. The last time I looked at it (along with Puppet and others), it seemed to be rather complicated with setting up Chef Server, CouchDB, RabbitMQ, and Solr. Ideally Chef just runs at the boot time of a EC2 instance, reads the recipes off from S3 and continues from there.
Chef and Puppet can definitely do this for you, without servers involved.
Another great use of Chef and Puppet can be seen in Vagrant (http://vagrantup.com/). Vagrant uses VirtualBox (http://www.virtualbox.org/) to create virtual instances easily (REALLY easily) and then can automatically provision them via Chef or Puppet. Sweet stuff. I love the ability to bring up a new server with the things I want to have so quickly.
I did a whole bunch of research into DevOps and Chef (or Puppet) were the clear winners. That's really kinda sad because Heroku's model is just sooo much more pleasant as a developer... at least to start.
I'd really love to see a better abstraction than "idempotent wrappers for shell commands" which is what Chef and Puppet basically are.
Most applications are simple enough to run as a single process with a read-only file system and log to standard out. Surely someone could use the Heroku Procfile model a reasonable starting point and create escape hatches down to lower levels as you need them.
Comments
Are you think of something like chef?
http://www.opscode.com/chef/
It maybe doesn't fit the bill of simple, but it's not too dreadfully hard to get set up if you only want it to fulfill some relatively straightforward tasks like you describe.
Thanks. I'll take a look at it again. The last time I looked at it (along with Puppet and others), it seemed to be rather complicated with setting up Chef Server, CouchDB, RabbitMQ, and Solr. Ideally Chef just runs at the boot time of a EC2 instance, reads the recipes off from S3 and continues from there.
You want chef-solo. No need for chef server.
Chef and Puppet can definitely do this for you, without servers involved.
Another great use of Chef and Puppet can be seen in Vagrant (http://vagrantup.com/). Vagrant uses VirtualBox (http://www.virtualbox.org/) to create virtual instances easily (REALLY easily) and then can automatically provision them via Chef or Puppet. Sweet stuff. I love the ability to bring up a new server with the things I want to have so quickly.
opscode now have a hosted chef server platform https://manage.opscode.com/
I did a whole bunch of research into DevOps and Chef (or Puppet) were the clear winners. That's really kinda sad because Heroku's model is just sooo much more pleasant as a developer... at least to start.
I'd really love to see a better abstraction than "idempotent wrappers for shell commands" which is what Chef and Puppet basically are.
Most applications are simple enough to run as a single process with a read-only file system and log to standard out. Surely someone could use the Heroku Procfile model a reasonable starting point and create escape hatches down to lower levels as you need them.