What are the benefits of running chef-server instead of chef-solo?
- by strife25
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 so:
Our web app code, dependencies, and chef cookbooks are stored in SCM
A build is executed and greats a single package for images to acquire and test against
The build engine then deploys new cloud images that run a chef client to get packages installed.
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?
