We are pleased to announce the initial release of a new Chef repository and Amazon EC2 AMIs that can be used to bootstrap a Chef server and clients in the Cloud!
In our experience as systems automation consultants, we built a library of best practices for designing and deploying web application infrastructures. The Opscode Cookbooks for Chef represent a significant amount of our efforts in this area. This new repository will provide a cohesive structure where the individual cookbooks get put to good use deploying a Rails application with a database backend. The client nodes are centrally managed with a Chef server that also provides OpenLDAP authentication, centralized logging with Rsyslog, and will soon include monitoring and trending.
This initial release is based on the current Chef release, 0.6.2. As such, it won't have the roles and cookbook metadata features that are coming soon, but future releases of the AMIs and the repository will support select new features as Chef evolves. We haven't integrated monitoring and trending features yet, but that is planned for a future release. We plan to release other virtual images, such as libvirt/KVM and VMware. We will also expand the documentation to describe other features, uses, and implementation examples. The github repository itself will be updated with new developments.
Ready to get started? Head on over to the Chef wiki page which will walk you through the basic steps to get up and running.