Introduction I recently had need of setting up a Chef server for some internal work. Instead of setting up a hosted Chef server, I decided to try launching a machine inside AWS. My main reasoning behind this was that we wouldn’t need the Chef server up too frequently, and so having the ability to keep […]
We have a situation where we use a lot of transient EC2 instances that are part of an integrated set of demonstration machines. They all refer to each other by DNS name that we have set up in a Route53 domain within AWS. For cost reasons, we shut these machines down any time we are […]
Always make sure you set your cookbook_path in knife.rb to something that makes sense for your working environment. People often get confused by how/where the ‘knife’ command is finding cookbooks during commands like “knife cookbook upload” or even “knife cookbooks create.” I remember when I first leaned Chef, I would type “knife cookbook create foo_book” […]
As a direct followup to my previous post, I thought the discussion of passing parameters in a build flow might be useful. Let’s start with our previous example. I’ve created a build flow that deploys an application and runs Front-End, Back-End and Integration Tests against that application in parallel. In addition, we’ve added several features […]
Jenkins is a powerful tool in your Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery toolbox. For my last clients over the past several years, we have utilized Jenkins to deploy software and preform automated testing. One of the most powerful tools I have used to orchestrate deployments and testing has been the Build Flow Plugin. It has allowed […]
I’ve worked on a number of DevOps projects recently where I’ve had to assemble Continuous Delivery (CD) pipelines to build, deploy, and test software. In my case, we’ve been using Chef to automatically deploy various components of a java-based web system using Jenkins. We have a lot of pipeline job chains created in Jenkins to […]
In our current continuous delivery pipeline, we have to distribute a number of secure keys to various servers for access to different resources. It’s common to use encrypted data bags in Chef to store protected values such as passwords or, in my case, SSH keys. The typical process for doing this is: 1. Create the […]
I have the problem of working against multiple open-source Chef servers to manage cookbooks, environments, etc in our continuous delivery pipeline. Chef and the “knife” tool, in general, like to use configuration information from ~/.chef/knife.rb. Within that file lies the all-important configuration item: chef_server_url. How do you deal with this if you’re working with multiple […]
New Sheriff in Town Having hopped on the CI/CD train early, starting out most of my work was with introducing a client to CI/CD and standing up an initial implementation. Later as DevOps and CI/CD matured, it became not uncommon to have to take over a failed or barely limping CI/CD implementation. The T word […]
I’ve been doing a lot of AWS, EC2, Cloud Formation, Chef, and Windows lately. In particular, we’re building a Continuous Delivery pipeline that launches groups of machines to build up application stacks. I have a situation where I need to build Microsoft SQL Server machines in the Amazon EC2 cloud environment. In particular, the operations […]
