Questions[chef](server)

I am a web developer, but I am also interested in a few administrative tasks. Hence, the new move from pure administration to dev-ops comes handy for me.

Anyway, I have some problems to put a few things into a relationship. Maybe there isn't any, so I wanted to ask for help to clarify.

Basically, what I want to put into relation is four types of software (from my understanding). The exact products don't matter, you can place any similar software as an alternative:

• Vagrant: From my understanding is to automate creation and management of VMs: Setting them up, starting and stopping them. This can be done using a local VM or remote, e.g. on a cloud platform.
• Docker: A "lightweight VM", based on a few Linux kernel concepts, which can be used to run processes in isolation, e.g. in a shared web hosting environment.
• Chef: A tool to setup and configure an operating system, e.g. inside a VM.
• OpenStack: A tool that allows you to build your own private cloud, hence comparable to something such as AWS.

Question #1: Are my explanations right, or am I wrong with some (or all) of these consumptions?

Question #2: How could I mix all those tools? Would that make any sense?

In my imagination and from my point of understanding, you could go and

• use OpenStack to build your own cloud,
• use Vagrant to manage the VMs run in the cloud,
• use Chef to setup these VMs
• and finally use Docker to run processes inside the VMs.

Is this correct? And if so, can you give me an advice in how to start using all this (it's quite a lot at the same time, and I don't know yet where to start)?

I want to run a cookbook_file resource only if the current environment is "dev". How can this be expressed?

The documentation suggests this:

In a recipe, a code block like this would be useful:

qa_nodes = search(:node,"chef_environment:QA")      
qa_nodes.each do |qa_node|                          
    # Do useful specific to qa nodes only
end

But I'm not sure that's what I want - the fact it's a loop seems wrong.

I intend to use chef or puppet to do administration (I'm thinking more of chef as it's younger and I get a better feeling about it).

In both home pages I saw there is an "enterprise edition" that costs money and I don't intend to buy anything. What would I miss in chef / puppet if I don't buy them?

What does chef offer that costs money exactly?
What does puppet offer that costs money exactly?

It was not so clear to me from their web site, as it's kind of obscure.

I use and love Puppet. I moved to a new company and they are adopting Chef. So I'm trying to learn Chef but am having a hard time piecing it all together because I still think in Puppet =)

These are my questions:

• Is it better to setup roles in Ruby DSL, JSON, or from the management console? Why are there multiple ways to do the same thing?
• Can you organize cookbooks into subdirectories? eg: we have custom software that I'd like to write a cookbook for and stick that into: chef-repo/cookbooks/ourcompanystuff/customsoftwarecookbook would this be a good practice?
• Do I create a cookbook for each type of role that specifies what it does? Do I have these cookbooks include other cookbooks (i.e. the cookbook for my webserver role includes the apache cookbook). I'm not sure how cookbook inter-dependencies and inheritance are handled.
• Is there anything like Puppet's external node classifier so nodes automatically determine their roles?
• It seems like you can configure things with knife or within the management console, or editing JSON files? This is super confusing to me why there are so many ways to do things, it's paralyzing! Is there a reason to use one or the other? Coming from puppet it seems like it'd be easy to accidentally mis-configure something with these tools (i.e.- leaving something out)
• How can I automatically provision nodes with Chef in my dev cluster? With Puppet I fire up a VM that connects to the puppermaster and kicks off a puppet run and sets itself up (role is determined by external node classifier). How do I do this with Chef? Install chef with pem/rb files that tie it to a chef server, manually tell the node its roles with knife or editing this in the management interface, and then kicking off a chef-client run to set itself up?

I completed the getting started tutorials and I see they have EC2 tutorials, but I've never used EC2 so they're hard for me to follow. At this point I have hosted Chef running and I'm starting to play around with configuring a single node. Where do I go from here? Do I need to start looking at the public cookbooks?

The docs on Opscode are ok, but not nearly as great as Puppet's. Are there any other good Chef resources I might be missing in my searches?

I am looking at automated deployment solutions for my team and have been playing with Chef for the past few days. I've been able to get a simple web app up an running from a base Red Hat VM using chef-solo.

Our end goal is to use Chef (or another system) to automatically deploy application topologies to the cloud as we run builds. Our process would basically run like this:

1. Our web app code, dependencies, and chef cookbooks are stored in SCM
2. A build is executed and creates a single package for images to acquire and test against
3. The build engine then deploys new cloud images that run a chef client to get packages installed.
4. The images acquire the cookbooks from SCM or the Chef server and install everything to get up and running

What are the benefits and/or use cases for getting a Chef Server running?

Are there any major benefits to have a Chef Server hold and acquire the cookbooks from SCM vs. using chef-solo and having a script that will pull the cookbooks from SCM?