An introduction to Chef and EC2.

1. Cooking up a Cloud
An intro to Chef & EC2
Nick Zadrozny

2. The good old days.
• Order up some servers
• Install an operating system
• Configure it manually
• Brag about the uptime a year later

3. The good old days.
• Order up some servers
• Install an operating system
• Configure it manually
• Brag about the uptime a year later

4. The good old days.
1. provision
you price out the hardware for a server
order the hardware and build it
or have some vendor build it for you
• Order up some servers
boot it up
run some burn-in tests to make sure it's all working
• Install an operating system
• Configure it manually
• Brag about the uptime a year later

5. The good old days.
• Order up some servers
• Install an operating system
2. bootstrap
install your operating system
shell script to install various prerequisites (i.e. ruby and rubygems)
• Configure it manually
• Brag about the uptime a year later

6. The good old days.
• Order up some servers
• Install an operating system
• Configure it manually
3. configure
manually configure your applications and ser vices
if you're sophisticated, perhaps t weak a shell script
• Brag about the uptime a year later

7. The good old days.
• Order up some servers
• Install an operating system
• Configure it manually
• Brag about the uptime a year later
4. command and control
deploy your app and use it
something running slow? ssh in and check the load

8. Virtualize!
• Skip all that nasty hardware stuff.
• Still have to do a lot of configuration.

9. Breaking it down:
•
As the time to provision
Provision
decreases, the time
invested in later steps
becomes the bottleneck!
This becomes particularly
•
obvious in the cloud.
Bootstrap
• Configure
• “Command & control”

10. Chef

11. • Resources
• Recipes
• Cookbooks
• Other stuff: attributes, templates, files,
definitions…

12. Live demo!
(Easier than making slides.)

13. Questions?

14. Thanks!