CODEWITHSUNDEEP
windowsiisdeploymentchef-infra
Vinoth
Vinoth

Reputation: 1995

Chef for Large scale web Deployment in windows

I am trying to do the MSI web deployment with chef. I have about 400 web servers with same configuration. We will do deployment in two slots with 200 servers each.

I will follow below steps for new release,

1) Increase the cookbook version.

2) Upload the cookbook to server.

3) Update the cookbook version to role and run list.

I will do lot of steps from cookbook like install 7 msi, update IIS settings, update web.configure file and add registry entry. Once deployment is done we need to update testing team, so that they can start the testing. My question is how could I ensure deployment is done in all the machines successfully? How could I find if one MSI is not installed in one machine or one web.config file is not updated properly?

My understanding is chef client will run every 30 Mins default, so I have wait for next 30 mins to complete the deployment. Is there any other way with push (I can’t use push job, since chef is removed push job support from chef High Availability servers) like knife chef client from workstation?

It would be fine, If anyone share their experience who is using chef in large scale windows deployment.

Thanks in advance.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 184

Answers (2)

coderanger
coderanger

Reputation: 54211

Nothing in here is specific to Windows, so more you are asking how to use Chef in a high-churn environment. I would highly recommend checking out the new Policyfile workflow, we've had a lot of success with it though it has some sharp limitations. I've got a guide up at https://yolover.poise.io/. Another solution on the cookbook/data release side is to move a lot of your tunables (eg. versions of things to deploy) out of the cookbook and in to a little web service somewhere, than have your recipe code read from that to get their tuning data. As for the push vs. pull question, most people end up with a hybrid. As @Tensibai mentioned, RunDeck is a popular push-based option. Usually you still leave background interval runs on a longer cycle time (maybe 1 or 2 hours) to catch config drift and use the push system for more specific deploy tasks. Beyond RunDeck you can also check out Fabric, Capistrano, MCollective, and SaltStack (you can use its remote execution layer without the CM stuffs). Chef also has its own Push Jobs project but I think I can safely say you should avoid it at this point, it never got enough community momentum to really go anywhere.

Upvotes: 1

Tensibai
Tensibai

Reputation: 15784

I personnaly use rundeck to trigger on demand chef runs.

According to your description, I would use 2 prod env, one for each group where you'll bump the cookbook version limitation for each group separately.

For the reporting, at this scale consider buying a license to get chef-manage and chef-reporting so you'll have a complete overview, next option is to use a handler to report the run status and send a mail if there was an error during the run.

Upvotes: 2

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