Using Chef to manage Amazon EC2 instances, Part 2 ⎋

Now that Amazon AWS authentication is out of the way and Chef client is set up locally, let’s create our first EC2 instance.

I am only interested in Ubuntu AMIs. I’ll set up the smallest available instance for testing, I’ll choose US East & Lucid Lynx 10.04 LTS 32bit (all reflected in the AMI id). I am also going to choose my availability zone by using the -Z option. This comes in handy for when you get the Availability Zone Error.

$ knife ec2 server create -i ami-5ca44e35 -f m1.small -S ec2-keypair -Z us-east-1a

Small EC2 instances are 32bit only

I could have created a new EC2 instance with ec2-run-instances as well, but I will be using knife as much as I can because it holds the secret to eternal sysadmin nirvana.

Now that the server is created, let’s set up chef-client and register it with our Opscode platform user.

$ knife bootstrap <ec2-public-ip-address> -N my-first-ec2-instance -x ubuntu --sudo

You’ll be shown the public IP after the server is created. I’m giving my new instance a name my-first-ec2-instance, I’m logging in as the ubuntu user (root is disabled by default), and I’m running all commands as sudo.

After the above is finished, let’s see what we have:

$ knife node list
[
  "my-first-ec2-instance"
]

Congratulations, you’ve created your first EC2 instance without breaking a sweat!

Your chef cookbooks

We know that knife is the bees knees. But how do you use it with your EC2 instance and available cookbooks?

I am assuming that you have followed the Getting Started with Chef tutorial closely. If you have, you should have your chef-repo locally and knife configured. Let’s get some relatively simple cookbooks: MongoDB & Redis. Unpack and place them in your cookbooks folder, then upload them to your Opscode platform user:

$ knife cookbook upload redis
$ knife cookbook upload mongodb

Let’s create a new role for our EC2. We create a new file roles/master-db.json containing:

{
  "name": "master-db",
  "default_attributes": {
    "chef": {
      "server_url": "https://api.opscode.com/organizations/<your-organization>",
      "cache_path": "/var/chef/cache",
      "backup_path": "/var/chef/backup",
      "validation_client_name": "<your-validator>",
      "run_path": "/var/chef"
    }
  },
  "json_class": "Chef::Role",
  "run_list": [
    "recipe[redis::source]",
    "recipe[mongodb::source]"
  ],
  "description": "Master DB",
  "chef_type": "role",
  "override_attributes": {
  }
}

Upload the role, then assign it to your new EC2 instance:

$ knife role from file roles/master-db.json
$ knife node run_list add my-first-ec2-instance "role[master-db]"

Log into your EC2 instance, change your ubuntu user password and run chef-client as sudo:

$ ssh ubuntu@ec2-xxx.compute-1.amazonaws.com
$ sudo -i
$ passwd ubuntu
<mysupersecurepassword>
$ exit
$ sudo chef-client

And that’s it! Your new Amazon EC2 instance now has a very recent MongoDB & Redis set up.

If you want to modify any cookbooks, copy the entire cookbook into your site-cookbooks folder and get hacking.

Cleaning up

I don’t want to leave that EC2 instance running, it was only created for testing purposes after all:

$ knife ec2 server list # I need the server ID
$ knife ec2 server delete i-xxxxxx
$ knife node delete my-first-ec2-instance
$ knife node list
[

]