Tag: Chef Automate

Introduction If you have deployed Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances via AWS CloudFormation, you most likely want to install software or configure the operating system of the instance. To accomplish this, you may have used cfn-init, one of the CloudFormation helper scripts available to AWS customers since February 2012. However, since that time AWS […]

It’s exciting to see how many AWS customers are taking advantage of AWS Systems Manager to manage and deploy infrastructure configuration at scale. I have previously blogged about the benefits of using AWS Systems Manager with configuration management tools, including Ansible and Salt. Recent improvements to the configuration management functionality, has made the service even […]

Creating a resilient configuration management system comes with a variety of challenges. The goal of this post is to solve an important component of this: failing over to a standby AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate server when a primary server is unavailable. With the procedure described in this post, if the main OpsWorks for Chef […]

During mandatory maintenance, AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate performs Chef Server and Chef Automate version, security, and operating system patching. Version updates for Chef go through extensive testing to verify they are production ready and don’t disrupt existing environments. When an instance is replaced, customers often ask how they can restore their custom settings in […]

Introduction For enhanced security, it’s often preferable to place resources in AWS within a subnet with no internet access. Recently, AWS expanded the number of services supported by interface VPC endpoints within the AWS ecosystem, so it’s now easier than ever to run AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate or AWS OpsWorks for Puppet Enterprise within […]

Any Chef server should be a hub of tested and trusted cookbooks that can be added to node run lists easily. However, the testing and delivery of cookbooks to the server itself can be an arduous task. To simplify and expedite this necessary process, we’ve leveraged AWS technologies to create a pipeline that executes integration testing […]

Throughout the life of your AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate environments there will be numerous updates and changes to one of the most crucial components – the chef-client. How can you ensure that you have the most up-to-date version of chef-client running on your OpsWorks for Chef Automate infrastructure? Can you make these updates in […]

Organizations that manage many nodes over larger geographical AWS Regions may wish to reduce latency and load between nodes in their AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate implementation. By distributing nodes between multiple servers, organizations encounter the challenge of how to ensure that cookbooks and other configurations are consistently deployed across two or more Chef Servers […]

Many large enterprises operate on a federated model. That is, they are separated into different business units or organizations, with different goals, procedures, and skill sets. These enterprises typically use a system to manage their infrastructure configuration and changes. You might ask, “Can we apply a federated model to configuration management? If so, what are […]

AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate and AWS OpsWorks for Puppet Enterprise provide fully managed Chef and Puppet servers with a suite of automation tools for infrastructure and application management. Enterprise customers rely on OpsWorks for easy configuration management and secure maintenance as the service automatically patches, updates, and backs up servers. This blog post gives […]