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.
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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/