Backendless Chef Wiki

This was built out of a necessity to not be zone locked by Chef's AWS HA.

While there is the new HA 2.0, this allows you to utilize AWS resources as the backend and scale across multiple regions (this specific template it region locked however)

You can take the cookbook and utilize the chef-server.rb and other options from it to figure out how to setup a multi-region if you wish.

What this project is

• It's a simple way to do auto-scaled frontends and leverage AWS as your backend support.
• It allows you to use all availability zones and avoid having a half-hearted failover.
• Lets AWS do all the heavy lifting, failovers, snapshot, etc...

What this project isn't

• Supported by chef; This project takes all the options provided by the 12.4+ releases and creates a non-supported chef configuration.

Requirements

• Chef Server 12.4+ for the elasticsearch and additional external options
• Exisiting ElasticSearch Stack
• Existing Postgesql DB (RDS)
  • Version 9.5+ supported

Addons Status

• Chef Manage - Supported and Installed in this project.
• Reporting - Currently not function, issues with the lack of RabbitMQ and External DB. Apparently there are fixes in the works for this by Chef.
• Analytics - Not Supported/Functional: Due to the rabbitmq service being shut off, you cannot use Analytics. Not sure if this will be fixed or not.
• Pushy Jobs - Not Functional, Yet: Pushy Jobs does not support the external DB yet, but it is being developed to do so.

Secrets

All secrets are set to noecho true, they are passed into a S3 bucket and citadel is utilized to pass secrets into the cookbook at run time. This is completely automated and only requires the parameters be filled out at CFN creation time, not pre-work required. Well, other than acquire the secrets for the features you wish to enable.