Chef¶

Overview¶

We have been supporting the OpsCode/Chef orchestration suite since 2009, and have a comprehensive Ruby stack within BastionLinux™ for this and other Ruby-based cloud tools. We also have a wide range of Knife plug-ins to manage infrastructure across EC2, VMWare, ESX, Rackspace, Google, Azure, HP Cloud along with many other useful knife functions.

Chef is a very fast-moving project and we track new releases closely. We also provide support to make major release upgrades completely transparent.

This is a backend server for these Chef client tools.

Highlights¶

Includes server and all client tools.
Upgradable: BastionLinux RPM upgrade/patch management
Managed Service Offering: System Monitoring and Configuration Management

Quickstart¶

Start an instance with 1-Click, or optionally using the EC2 Console
Have just a little patience: it does take a couple of minutes for all the background services to start up in your instance. If you get connection refused or site error messages - just wait a moment
Start using your installation - we have pre-configured ~root/.chef/knife.rb on the instance:

..code:
```
$ knife client list
```

Migration¶

It is straightforward to migrate from our old Chef 10.x installation to our 11.x+.

$ knife --config /path/to/old/knife.rb download clients nodes users data_bags
$ knife --config /path/to/new/knife.rb upload clients nodes users data_bags

Our preference is to deploy roles and cookbooks out of git; and do cookbook installation/dependency management with Berkshelf. But you could manage these via this mechanism too.

Once you’re on 11.x; it is also possible to use PostgreSQL backup/restore; but the method outlined here has the advantage that you can, using wildcards, filter what you might wish to upload.