On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 7:39 AM, david brpr david.eauee@gmail.com wrote:
i am currently evaluating Chef against puppet for my company and i am having
a bit of trouble finding specific information regarding the performance and
scalability of a chef server.
It depends on your environment. Chef scales by adding API endpoints
(chef-server-api, the webui) that are typically concurrency bound by
memory and eventually by CPU. On the back end, CouchDB and Solr both
have fairly well published scalability documentation - the gist is,
scale them vertically for a while, and when you need to, you can talk
about various sharding strategies.
Would anyone have any metrics on the load that a single chef server can take
in term node count based on a context (hardware and otherwise).
This depends on how big the chef server is. Most likely, you are going
to be bound by concurrency - RAM/CPU.
Also the docs & wikis keep boasting about the horizontal scalability of chef
but i cannot find any details on it.
It scales the same way a web application scales.
How is it achieved/architect-ed?
Use load balancers/reverse proxies in front of the API and Web UI
endpoints, and use traditional HA techniques for CouchDB and Solr.
what does it take to expand chef server cluster?
Add more API endpoints behind a LB/proxy.
what are the implication in HA terms?
That it's a pretty typical scenario, if you have more than a passing
familiarity with scaling web applications.
Best,
Adam
--
Opscode, Inc.
Adam Jacob, Chief Product Officer
T: (206) 619-7151 E: adam@opscode.com