I’m starting a blog series on chef where I would be taking you to a journey of managing my current infrastructure using Chef. To start with these are the high level tasks lists that I’ve in mind:
- User Management : User’s creation or deletion on an environment(Dev/QA/Staging/Production) should be managed by chef, along with kind of access on the environment i.e read-only access, root access, or adding a user to some groups.
- VPN Setup : Currently we are using openvpnas for managing secured access to our environment, it is manual right now so the vpn set-up will also be done by chef.
- Apache Setup : We are using apache as web server that sits in front of our app server and also provides SSL.
- Jar App : We have a SOA based set-up in which we have multiple micro java services, so we would be using chef to manage those jar app i.e deploying those jar app’s, starting/stopping those jar app’s.
- Tomcat : Another major component type in our application are web apps that are hosted on tomcat server, the tomcat server is not managed as a service instead we create tomcat as an app user along with tomcat management scripts.
- Mongo : We use replicated mongo as No SQL database in our application.
- Logstash : For managing logs we are using log stash in a clustered set-up where all the log agents publish the logs to a central server and then served by Kibana, so this complete setup should also be managed by chef
- ActiveMQ : We are using ActiveMQ for our queuing purpose
This list is not complete surely, I’ll be adding many more tasks in this list as I proceed in setting up my environment using chef as this is the first time I’ll be doing a set-up using Chef, but this list will be a good starting point.
Before jumping into creating the Chef cookbooks, runlists or data bags I’ve to setup the base infrastructure of Chef that is Chef Server to which all chef agents talk to, a chef workstation which would be updating the server with the configurations and a git repo to keep track of all my configuration as shown in the image given below.
In the next blog I’ll talk about how I’ll set-up a chef server. Let me know if you have any inputs for me or suggestion that how I should proceed with the chef set-up.
