If you followed my blog, you probably know about chef and vagrant. So the other day I managed to upgrade to VirtualBox 4.0. The upgrade just happened by accident, so to speak. I noticed that Virtualbox 4.0 had moved from nonfree to contrib on Oracle’s repository which is why I had previously missed it. With 4.0, I am now able to run the latest and greatest Vagrant — and with Vagrant being pre-1....
So the other day, I wanted to quickly check something in BigCouch and thanks to Vagrant, chef(-solo) and a couple cookbooks — courtesy of Cloudant — this was exceptionally easy. As a matter of fact, I had BigCouch running and setup within literally minutes. Here’s how. Requirements You’ll need git, Ruby, gems and Vagrant (along with Virtualbox) installed. If you need help with those items, I suggest you check out my previous blog post called Getting the most out of Chef with Scalarium and vagrant....
Ever since I started playing around with Unix ~13 years ago, I’ve been a fan of automating things. What started out as writing little (maybe pointless) shell scripts slowly but surely morphed into infrastructure automation today. As for my, or maybe anyone’s, motivation to do these things, I see three main factors: I’m easily bored — because repeating things is dull. I’m easily distracted (when I’m bored). I’m German: Of course we strive for perfection and excellence....
In 2010, operations became an even more central part of my life. As I write this blog post (in early January, 2011), we have been running on Amazon AWS — and EC2 in particular — for over a year. Previously we had used a service called RightScale but in Q3 of 2010, we moved on/away from RightScale and started using chef and a service called Scalarium. Because Opscode’s chef became such a big part of my work life, I gave a talk about chef, and chef-solo in particular, at last December’s PHP Usergroup meeting in Berlin....